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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
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
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.
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?
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?
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No one thinks she is. But unless she's committing murder, this reaction is overblown. We think the people attacking her are scum for making something that would be a small deal for any male in a similar position into one of the biggest conspiracies ever.
And that their actions reinforce the notion that misogynistic beliefs have become endemic to the "culture" of gaming, inasmuch as it has one.
And that actually ties back to Sarkeesian's work, because science has shown that objectified media leads to this kind of hostility and discrimination against women.
People are objecting not because Quinn and Sarkeesian are angels, on a pedestal and beyond reproach, but because there are elements of culture that are causing this problem and standing up against it is the only thing that's going to see change.
People are objecting not because Quinn and Sarkeesian are angels,
No, you are standing up for them because they are women. Women that, as you have admitted, have done bad things. But it's everyone else that are the sexists.
Nonsense. My exposure to this issue has been entirely through articles like this one attempting to demonize the ex-boyfriend, who by all accounts was treated in a way that would have been absolutely blasted if it had been towards a woman. She was cheating on him with the people who were supposed to be reviewing her work, all the while manipulating him into thinking he was crazy for suspecting that she was cheating. She claimed that it would be "rape" to have an intimate relationship with someone while cheating behind their back, and then did exactly that. And shes apparently a chronic liar.
The "huge conspiracy" I simply havent seen; I literally had not heard of this issue until I saw an article on ArsTechnica on what a scumbag guys are for demonizing Zoe Quinn (What? Who?). Apparently shes so notorious that the most white knighting article on Ars and Slashdot cannot have her looking good at the end; theres just too much dirt out there for even the most heavily spun article to hide.
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?
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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.
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!