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Combating Recent, Ugly Incidents of Misogyny In Gamer Culture
ideonexus writes: 2490 gamers, developers and journalists have signed an open letter supporting inclusiveness in the gaming community after indie game developer Zoe Quinn received backlash and harassment when her ex-boyfriend posted false accusations that she traded sex for favorable reviews of her game and feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was driven from her home after receiving death and rape threats for her videos illustrating the way some mainstream games encourage the commoditization of and violence against women. The harassment has prompted geek-dating advice columnist Harris O'Malley to declare the backlash the "Extinction Burst of Gaming Culture," the last reactionary gasp before the culture shifts to become more inclusive.
There's no such thing as politically correct. There's no such thing as a right not to be offended. Both of these run counter to freedom of speech.
Nobody's going to force me to "include" people that I don't agree with, period. If you don't like it, fuck off.
That being said, the asshole ex-boyfriend should be turned into a eunuch and ridiculed for being such a wuss for the rest of his life.
I don't know anybody who has any idea who these people are, nor do they give one shit about any of this stuff. They just play games. I don't think these "cultures" and "communities" are nearly as big as people think they are. It's limited to a VERY small set of people commenting and participating in all this high-school drama. Of course, once it's on twitter and the internet in general, everyone thinks its way bigger than it actually is.
News flash -- It's not.
It doesn't seem to be pervasive. We've all seen the recent stats on similar stories. Over half of all gamers are female. Less than 1/5 are under the age 18. The stereotypical teenage boy gamer is a small component of the "gamer" culture.
I doubt this is "Misogyny In Gamer Culture". I think instead this is just a few vocal idiots.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Either that or you're some kind of uber-paranoid idiot savant sans savant...
Reference-less accusations seem to prove the article's point.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So TFS says that the accusations regarding Zoe Quinn were false. I hadn't heard this bit yet, is the article linked to actually confirmation of that? Sorry, I'd read the articles for myself but work filters are a PITA. The last I had heard was that the guy who writes for RPS and Kotaku had confirmed their sexual relationship.
I honestly don't care about her sex life or lack there of. The only thing of interest to me is a "journalist" possibly sleeping with a person with whom he should have a more professional relation ship with, and not disclosing that fact when making mention of her work, whether positive or negative.
The hypocrisy of third wave feminism should, at the very least, be pointed out, and it's a straw man to call doing that misogynistic.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The accuser produces the evidence.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
I have big issues with suggestions that games promote violence against women.
Most games promote nothing. Collectively they involve a lot of violence.
Some of that violence is against women. Most of it is against men. For instance earlier today I launched a major offensive against a 28000 man army, slaughtering around 79% of the enemy and losing a third of my own men. No women were harmed.
Perhaps someone standing up in public screaming 'me me me' shouldn't be surprised when some fuckwit goes 'yeah, you'. Just keep the rest of us out of it.
I knew it was going downhill for a long time, now it's dead, because it's been taken over by the Social Justice Warriors.
The inability to go look for yourself means you're the kind of person who doesn't care at all about the facts. The facts are all over the place. Stop being lazy.
Making potentially defamatory claims without evidence is not just lazy, but possibly also illegal depending on where you live. Show your work.
Are we talking about the same Zoe Quinn? The Zoe Quinn who shut down a gamejam specifically targetted at helping women coders, because she perceived it as in competition with her own fundraising efforts?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I'm not a fan of video games.
B-but she never said that! She did. She doesn't like games, and she isn't a gamer. It must be nice to be such a deluded idiot.
So you argue that some men in shining white armor should come to the aid of the damsels in distress? Isn't it ironic how the harassed women are now used as a damsel-in-distress plot device in some gamer misogyny story?
I generally dont keep up on this stuff, but the post by Zoe's ex was filled with actual proof that she is apparently unbelievably manipulative. I didnt see any rebuttals, either-- just complaints that he crossed a line by posting private conversations. That can be argued, but noone seems to deny the accusations.
I didnt get to the parts about accusing her of trading sex for reviews or anything, but shes not the shining champion of feminist rights that you want.
I'm guessing the article was written by someone that was just born. It has existed forever in gaming. My wife is a gamer chick and back in the 80's she had to deal with this crap.
It's not only video games. she used to play MTG in tournaments 8 years ago (She has a 4 digit DCI number), last time she played she was harassed several times by the low IQ morons that are prevalent in society to the point that she refuses to play it ever again.
This crap is not new, what is needed is people finding these scumbags that pull this crap on girls/women and beating the shit out of them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Question, why do you (generally speaking) feel the need to lump all the people who disagree with you together into one group, give that group a sarcastic name, and then abbreviate that name into an acronym which you can then use as a accusatory label whenever the subject comes up for discussion?
It sounds like the kind of thing my old paranoid-schizophrenic girlfriend would do when talking about "them", but i presume you are not mentally ill, so there must be some other reason for it. Is it some kind of bonding thing between people who feel threatened by others? Or do you believe that by creating the appearance of some kind of organized opposition that you will sway "neutral" parties toward your side? It just sounds dumb to me, but maybe i'm not the intended audience?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That slashdot plays along is not surprising, this website has a long reputation of pandering to that crowd and backing down on real facts cases like these. It's much easier to just play along right?
I first heard about Slashdot when I was still dependent on AOL, a dial-up modem and an affordable toll-free regional calling plan.
Then and now when the geek speaks about women, I can't escape the feeling that I have been teleported back to the high school locker rooms of 1964. The only pandering on this site is to the geek's own adolescent sense of manhood,
Thank you for fighting the good fight.
I almost didn't even look at the comments here, especially since I'd burnt through the last of my mod points last night, and especially the first wave of really offensive shit that gets posted any time the treatment of women in geek culture comes up just depresses the hell out of me. (I'm trying to stick to the optimistic version opined by another friend, wherein there's a really grim whiny ass first wave, which mostly gets modded down over time. Over course, the friend wrote to me a couple of days back to tell me he'd decided that no, he took it back, anything involving women was getting a fair bit worse.)
The creepiest bit is that half of my social circle, roughly, are male geeks* and they generally seem like a decent bunch, individually and in groups. My students are an amiable bunch, even in those final crunch days as they're trying to wrap up an experiment or get a paper in. Is the first wave of /. comments overwhelmingly from bitter seventeen year olds? Are these some other geeks who I have managed to distance myself from over the years.** Is it possible that some of the entertaining, amiable geeks that I spar with, party with, code with and blow things up with turn feral and run in packs when I'm not around? Eesh.
* Well, okay, that assumes that the martial artists are predominantly geeks, which might get into some kind of definitional argument. *Many* clearly are.
This isn't about Zoe Quinn. This is about Gamers being bullied and their hobby being culturally colonised by corrupt hypocrites.
Gamers are the victims here. The people crying misogyny are the real bigots. Look up the harshtags #Gamergate and especially #notyourshield on twitter to get a real feel for what is going on here.
May the Maths Be with you!
I'm a male gamer and I agree with the assertion that video games with women typically find methods of objectifying the female form... but it's not as though video games or gamer culture is unique in this way. The gaming industry objectifies women. As does Hollywood. And print media.
One of the best selling products in history is the female form and it sells well. Sex sells well. What do you do in a capitalist society when there is a seemingly unlimited demand for a product of which you have a nearly unlimited supply? Well, you sell it.
We can even take it a step further an confidently assert that there will always be a sufficient supply of the female form to meet or exceed demand due to psychological imperative with which most Western girls grow up that suggests that if they cannot receive validation of self through other actions or deeds, then there's always the option to resort to sexuality. One could even assert that this persistent and potentially indoctrinated psychological rationale may be one of the roots of reproduction for humanity.
And it's even easier to supply the female form in games because you don't even need a female. You just need artistic skills and an imagination!
So we've defined the multifaceted problem (biologically-enforced demand and an unlimited supply). We've also based the discussion on the issues that such objectification is becoming more and more of a nuisance to the comfort of more and more people (social evolution).
So what is to be done?
Stop all games that singularly sexualize the female form? What if both the male and female forms are equally sexualized? All good?
Do the same for video and print media?
Do we affect demand?
Are we to shame males and lesbians for appreciating the female form in game, video, and print media?
And this is where I always get stuck. If we want to change the frequency or the visibility of the objectification of the female form, we have to affect supply, demand, or both-- but doing so by shaming or legislation seems to infringe not only upon the social contract but upon biological imperatives thus making such an effort pointless.
So what is to be done?
It shows the account was specifically created for this, posted everything in 3 minutes, and was discovered and screencapped 12 seconds later without being logged in or doing a search. In other words: whosoever took the screencap knew about this the moment it was done.
Or maybe Anita Sarkeesian saw the first tweet from that account in her mentions, navigated to the tweeter's Twitter stream, decided to take a screencap, copied the URL, opened up a private tab and took the screen cap. She would have had 3 minutes to do that, and it only takes a few seconds to do.
(The reason why one should always take screen caps in private tabs or private windows is that it minimizes the risk that your screencap will inadvertently reveal any personal information about you.)
Then and now when the geek speaks about women, I can't escape the feeling that I have been teleported back to the high school locker rooms of 1964. The only pandering on this site is to the geek's own adolescent sense of manhood,
I am a geek, and I am not a misogynist. It is wrong for you to engage in prejudicial stereotyping.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Asshole or misogynist, it doesn't matter. The behavior should be viewed as unacceptable. Fuck, do you go around telling people on the street that you're going to kill or rape them? And trying to shade the issue because someone used one negative term rather than the other, when no one will know what the actual motivation was, just gives cover for this obnoxious behavior. You just shouldn't fucking do that shit, mmmkay?
Plus, idiots like these are driving us towards the day when anonymity on the internet goes away. Do you want that? Because that's what it's coming to, boys and girls. So either act like adults and figure out a way to police yourselves in a reasonable way, or get locked down - the internet is now too important to the "normal" function of our society to allow a bunch of misogynists, assholes, or whatever to disrupt it. And the powers that be certainly won't let that happen. Defense of anyone who acts like this for any reason only makes things worse.
That is all.
She didn't say she doesn't like games, she said that she wasn't a "fan", i.e. just a casual player. I wouldn't say I'm a fan of modern games because I haven't played many, but that doesn't mean if someone invites me to try one I won't enjoy it.
Instead of making ad-hominem attacks why not address the points she makes in her videos directly? Can you point to specific examples of where her research and conclusions were incorrect and undermine her wider argument?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When they're abusing statistics with the goal of spreading hate, when many mainstream feminists have rabidly man-hating quotes strung behind them, and when they don't collectively struggle for equal responsibility that definition sounds pretty damn hollow.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
She slept with this guy and "coincidentally" her game floated to the top of his list. At the very least it is a conflict of interest.
Whose conflict of interest? I can see how it would be a conflict of interest for the journalist to single out the game like that. I'm not sure what the developers conflict of interest is though.
So lets jump off the deepend straight to accusations that she is a manipulative woman willing to have sex with a journalist to get exposure. Even if that were true, so what? She's not the one required to maintain journalistic integrity. That's on the journalist.
Or maybe the journalist was using his position in the industry to try and get laid. Why aren't we calling him out as a total creep, with no integrity, selling female indie developers exposure for sex? Perhaps he initiated the offer by hinting he'd plug her work if they hooked up?
Or maybe its neither? Maybe two people got together out of some sort of mutual attraction. And the journalist, clearly holding her and her work in some regard makes a bad judgement call to make favorable mention of her work without disclosing the relationship. End of story? Why do we know its not that?
Is there any evidence this was a deliberate attempt to get a favorable review, as opposed to being merely a deliberate attempt by both parties to get laid with the subsequent favorable mention as nothing more than a poor judgement call by the journalist?
I think it takes millions of rapists (mostly men natch) to reach that number.
And you would be wrong. At least, you would be wrong if you are implying anything other than the majority of rapes are committed by a small minority of predatory men.
How small?
75-80% of rapes are committed by 4-5% of men: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...
That's still seven or eight million men in absolute terms, of course, but far fewer than what is erroneously claimed by the old, failed, misandrist "rape is nothing less than a conscious conspiracy by all men against all women" model.
It is easy for us, as humans, to leap from "all rapists are men" to "all men are rapists". Even if the former proposition were true (it isn't) the latter is unrelated to it.
There is a population of sociopathic predators in our midst. Most of them are men. All of them are dangerous. Their victims are both men and women (we don't even know what the rate of male victimization in sexual assault is... all we know is that the reported rate is much lower than for women, but it would be, wouldn't it?)
Focusing on men vs women rather than citizens vs predators is exactly what the predators need to keep on preying on the innocent. It's time we stopped doing that.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
setting your interesting take on thing aside, if true, none of it means anyone has a right to threaten to beat, rape and kill her.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I call the people involved in this scandal "Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)" principally because I refuse to insult the feminist or progressive movements by calling these people with feminists or progressives. Genuine second-wave feminists have publicly criticised their behaviour.
If you want to understand the difference, look up the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags on twitter. The Social Justice Warriors are hateful, disingenuous, at times sociopathic bigots. They are adult, internet-empowered versions of the bullies and tormentors which many gamers remember from secondary school.
Gamers are the victims here. The modus-operandi of the SJWs is to cast themselves in the cloth of underprivileged groups -- most SJWs are in fact white, upper middle class, college aged -- then proceed to level accusations of privilege, bigotry, and misogyny against just about anyone involved in gaming for even the slightest perceived infractions. A climate of fear has developed, first in the indie and later wider gaming industry as a result of the "social justice" witchhunts which these people regularly engage in. Worse, this has resulted in SJW-aligned developers and journalists rising to positions of power and being first in line for awards and increasingly development funding, with cronyism trumping competence.
For Gaming, so often a hobby of last resort for the excluded and isolated in society, this is an awful and tragic outcome. For gamers, male, female, straight, gay or trans, it is a frightening development. Their hobby, their refuge, is being taken over by bullies.
Because their rhetoric and especially actions come across as so farcically disingenuous, I don't believe for a second that SJWs actually believe in or support the causes of homosexuals or transgender people in video games. Their support for women is also largely forced, and disturbingly biased towards the conservative view of women as a weaker sex who must be protected/defended (A view consistently challenged by the games industry over the years).
My honest opinion of SJWs is that they are privileged Neo-liberals, who adopt a forced social justice persona both to project their own (increasingly obvious) bigotry onto others, and ultimately to benefit themselves socially and financially. They are disingenuous, extremist bullies, and the gaming community is under co-ordinated PR attack, and has been almost completely censored on gaming websites.
The Social Justice Warriors are right about one thing though; this is a historical moment. Whether they win or lose, the GamerGate scandal will be seen as a watershed moment in the history of online-communities, and who controls them. Two weeks ago, I would never have believed that a clique so small could all but take-over a community so large, but it is becoming clear that this is precisely what (almost?) happened to gaming. There are lessons to be learned here, unrelated to the immediate issues, and I only hope the right people will take note and heed them.
May the Maths Be with you!
Stop moving the goalposts. The accusations by here boyfriend are here:
http://thezoepost.wordpress.co...
Tell me, which one of these accusations is false?
Those aren't the false accusations referred to by the article. The false accusations are the ones that suggest that she slept with Nathan Grayson in order to persuade him to write a positive review of one of her games. These accusations were quite widespread (e.g. 1, 2, 3), and appear to be completely false because nobody has pointed out a review written by Grayson of any of Quinn's games which was published after the date she's accused of sleeping with him.
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone who doesn't know her personally would care what men she chooses to sleep with. It's not like it's actually any of our business, really. The one important accusation, that she used sex to get positive reviews for her game, turns out to be false. So let's just forget about the rest, OK?