It's not the default because it doesn't work as well for most people.
It works very well for most people. Google is popular precisely because that mode works well for most people. And virtually everyone I'm talking to right now, geek and non-geek alike, agrees Google's new search mode is shit.
Pro-tip: you can get the old useful Google back (temporarily, there's no way to save it as a default) by hitting Search Tools -> Change "All Results" to "Verbatim"
Why they don't let you make that the fucking default - in fact, WHY IT ISN'T THE DEFAULT - is anyone's guess.
Why not? They have money, and the people who urgently need it (as opposed to it being a nice to have) don't - get the people who spend $5,000 on a carbon frame to pay for the R&D and initial start-up costs, and then supply the people who need it as soon as you can afford to do so.
It makes sense. It sounds wrong, but grants for this kind of work aren't just readily available, and ultimately this means that the people who need the work get it.
I guess we can count ourselves lucky it was seals fouling up the experiment, at least they leave and don't mess up the surveys even more, unlike those damned sea lions.
Quite I program desktop applications the same way. No fancy debuggers, and I use Notepad to write the source code. Then I print out the source code using an ordinary printer and hand compile the code into hex codes, which I input back into the system and write out as a.EXE using an Excel VBA Script program I wrote myself.
Android called its VM something different and still got sued by Oracle for distributing a derivative of the Java Language Specification that did not pass tests.
Yes, and Oracle lost that lawsuit...
(If they'd won I suspect the consequences for Java would have been disastrous anyway, the entire eco-system would have become toxic with any legal ruling that effectively says you can't modify Java in any way and release the results without Oracle's permission. I still remain amazed they took it that far.)
It's not too little. It's too late to prevent a full scale migration from Java, as the latter is too deeply entrenched within the enterprise (plus I doubt Android is going to go there soon), but it does change the dynamic.
.NET hasn't had support from the FOSS communities in large part because it's only first class on Windows, because the core system wasn't fully open source, and because, well, Microsoft.
Other than "Microsoft" (and.NET's rival is no longer nice cuddly Sun, but Oracle, so there's that...), none of that is true any more. And it's an extremely capable, versatile, system that is arguably one of the best things ever to come out of Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Java doesn't seem to have the momentum it once had, we're slowly seeing improvements but there's a sense I have (and maybe I'm wrong) that 99% of the new features promised for Java (x+1) are there to solve issues in Java (x). I frequently see amazing stuff in C# that frequently makes you wonder why we're still avoiding it for scripting languages.
This is good. It builds trust. It creates a two way dynamic between the FOSS and.NET communities that previously was awkward and revolved entirely around people obsessive about Microsoft's technology choices.
Because he doesn't believe there's systemic racism he's a troll? Most middle and upper middle class (read: educated) white folks really aren't racist at all
Just a note: systemic discrimination operates independently of individual discrimination.
As an example, a business or industry that recruits heavily through word-of-mouth recommendations is likely to end up with a systematic racism problem, because even though the individuals within the system may be well meaning and totally non-racist, any existing disparity, however slight, in social or employment circles, will get cemented, or even amplified given a non-zero percentage of employees will discriminate, by such a strategy.
Given the number of documented and easy to find ways in which systematic racism and individual racism exists, it's not hard to believe someone claiming it doesn't is not being honest.
The clearest evidence that GamerGate is still primarily misogyny (remember: Baldwin coined the term promoting a video attacking a female game developer for having sex with people who weren't her boyfriend) is that GamerGaters still self-identify their "enemy" as being not journalists but "SJWs" - people concerned about the treatment of women within the gaming world.
You guys are also having problems coming up with a real case of problems in journalistic ethics to rally around - thus far the nearest you've had to an actual success (ie one that was real, not imaginary) was Gawker making a joke in bad taste... about GamerGate itself.
But you don't seem to be running out of women to try to force out of game development.
Why is it socially acceptable to demonize an entire demographic (gamers)?
It isn't, which is why the quote doesn't include the word gamer, doesn't imply all gamers, and doesn't demonize gamers.
The article was about "Games culture" - and the quotes here are important, a non-existent or barely existent sales demographic that Alexander felt the games industry was wasting too much time aiming at. She was making the point that only a minority of gamers fit into that demographic.
You and the others who attacked Gamasutra for that story who claimed it was aimed at all gamers completely misread an article essentially saying "Only a tiny minority of gamers are misogynistic trollish jackasses, so stop aiming 90% of your games at misogynistic trollish jackasses" as meaning "All gamers are misogynistic trollish jackasses". What's amazing to me is that the people who seemed most offended at the characterization are, ironically, the gamers who are misogynistic trollish jackasses...
Two posts in and we already have the douchebag who decides that any attempt to deal with harassment is the same as dealing with offensive material.
Let me spell it out for you, in a way that means your tiny little mind understands: You want to say "Feminazis are ruining videogames, I want more tits please!" go right ahead. Shout it out loud! We'll think you're an idiot who doesn't understand what's actually being asked for, and sure many will be offended, but nobody's denying your right to.
On the other hand, "@madamemariecurie Fuck you and your science you should have stayed in the kitchen, I'm coming right over to your lab at 37 Rue de Nord, Paris 50123 to murder you and defile your body": that's what we want people in jail for.
We also want some kind of action (but nobody's calling for legal/criminal action except in the most extreme instances) against people who dogpile and take other online action designed to specifically target individuals with hate messages. Again - you can post "Women suck, men are better at everything" 100 times in your own Twitter account, but ensuring @madamemariecurie gets 50 messages a day calling her a c---, and using sock puppets and even like minded individuals to bypass blocks? We'd like online services to kick you off their networks in response to that.
That's all anyone is asking for. Not censorship, because censorship is the prevention of a viewpoint from being stated, not even the suppression of offensive opinions, but an end to online harassment.
Why is that so hard? Can you seriously not tell the difference between "Women are evil", "@madamemariecurie You are a c---", and "@madamecurie I am going to rape and kill you."
Hmmm, that sounds like it would best be implemented using some kind of cross platform networked app layer. Maybe we could describe forms and windows using some kind of XML-based language so it's familiar to programmers, perhaps with a lightweight OO scripting language tying it together, and some basic security checks to ensure that networked data doesn't accidentally leak from one source to another and with no access to files on the underlying device.
I get the impression that much of this was integrated into the browser because half the criticisms of Firefox came from people who had tools like Firebug installed - itself infamous for bloating the footprint of any browser it was running in.
I seriously doubt any of the dev tools that come built-in to Firefox, Chrome, or IE are doing much if anything to bloat them. What I suspect is happening is that webdevs themselves are making use of features en-mass that are turning out to have some disastrous memory side effects - unconstrained closures due to widespead jQuery use would be a good example.
If he were serious about it, he'd have announced this before the friggin' election.
This is just setting up a fight for the next couple of years that he fully expects to lose, but in a way that leaves the opposing side less popular. That's all.
Yes, but it's not a useful point in context. Nobody's arguing it's impossible to influence anyone using the written work or a useful graphic. What's being argued is that certain base behaviors (violence in particular) are influenced simply by showing them.
But there's no mechanism I can see that would be shared between interactive violence in Quake III Arena, and an ad for GEICO Insurance. If GEICO for some reason decided to build a video game where you prevented people from attacking you by signing up for insurance policies, they might get more sales than Progressive, because their name is on the game, but they probably wouldn't expand the insurance market at all.
Yes, there's a responsibility by those saying no link to justify their assertion, but there's also a responsibility by those saying there could be to come up with a reasonable cause and effect mechanism that specifically applies to the situation in hand. By just saying "Well, advertising affects behavior!" you're not actually identifying a mechanism involved, you're simply saying they're kinda similar because you can use similar words - which is always a dangerous argument to make.
I'm not saying there aren't things in common, what I'm saying is that there are sufficient differences in the dynamic that you can't apply a study researching the links between violence and video games with the sexism and video games - there's nothing to suggest that the similarities are where the lack of a link would show itself.
Violence is encouraged by many direct and immediate factors, such as high levels of stress. If video games relieve that stress, they may discourage violence. Additionally violence in games is (almost always) shown as a necessity only during certain extreme situations, usually where your own life is under threat from the same things that you are trying to kill.
Neither of these dynamics apply to sexism. You don't relieve your "urge" to pinch your secretary's butt by sitting in a virtual strip bar. You don't relieve an "urge" to wolf whistle at a passer by by "rescuing" a helpless two-dimensional damsel in order to make her your own. You don't relieve either of these things because there's no urge there to begin with (or maybe I'm projecting, but I've never seen either as something I've felt an urge to do.) Additionally, sitting in a virtual strip bar in the games that do it isn't accompanied by some kind of implied justification in the same way as violence is.
Again, lest it's not clear, I'm not saying I agree that sexism in video games causes sexism in real life. I think people can figure out the difference between representative screen objects and real, living breathing, human beings quite easily, and sexism is more a problem of upbringing accompanied by the power dynamics people see in actual real life.
But I don't think you can prove that by showing a study in violent video games that shows violence is A-OK.
Which aspect of advertising? Because 99% of advertising is simply about ensuring people have heard of $BRANDNAME (or don't forget about it.)
Yes, there's a lot of shaping the message. There's a reason no major advertisers use maggots or cockroaches as their spokesmascots. But then, most games that present violence are:
1. Not reminding you it exists. Pretty certain you already know about it.
2. Not sugar coating it. I don't think anyone's ever played a violent video game and said afterwards "Woah! Violence is way better than I thought it was!" Victims of violence in video games are generally shown as worse off, the necessity of violence is usually restricted to cases where there's a higher principle involved, and people who use it are generally required to either justify it, or be seen as terrible people.
I don't agree sexism in games causes sexism either, but I don't think you can link it to a "violence in video games" study.
Sexism is about attitudes and how people are viewed. Violence? Only partially. And arguably a case can be made that violence in video games could decrease violence in real life because it provides an outlet for aggression. As in "My boss was an ass to me today, I'm going to take it out on some virtual cops rather than deal with my anger issues the traditional way".
Whereas it's hard to make that argument work with sexism. "Oh, I asploded a stripper on the way to rescuing a 2D princess who will be my property when I get her, now in real life I'm going to treat men and women the same at the office and stop sexually harassing passers by because I got my fix from Grand Hitman Mario." Yeah. Doesn't really work, does it.
I think minds are a little more complex than those who look for causal links between sexism in media and sexism in real life claim, but I wouldn't think for a moment a study in violence in media is somehow relevant to the issue of attitudes towards roles seen in media.
The title (Tropes vs. Women) is suggestive, but doesn't quite go so far as to claim actual harm is being done in real life.
Well, kinda, it suggests there's conflict. The point is right in the title is the that this is about Tropes opposing Women. Anyone watching an episode sees the title, and then the disclaimer. They then see Sarkeesian talking about tropes, individual tropes, and insofar as individual video games are mentioned it's virtually always to show (a) 100* screencaptures of the trope being employed in 100 different games to prove it is a trope and (b) a sequence from two or three games, or description of how the trope manifests itself in one or two games, illustrating the key features of the trope.
There's a vast difference between "games aren't aimed at you" and "harm". Anyway, I'm not so convinced on the damsel thing. I'm pretty sure a greater percentage of women played the Mario games ("damsel in distress", though the framing story was pretty unimportant to gameplay) than play Call of Duty (which has plenty of "dude in distress" missions).
Which is, whether you're right or wrong, a reasonable and appropriate response. I'm not trying to make any point implying Sarkeesian is always right. What I am saying is that she makes a statement, and from it her "critics" come up with interpretations of what she meant that are completely off-base and aren't even reasonable extrapolations of what words she's used.
To have a sane conversation, when someone says "X=Z", you can reasonably say "X is not Z! I disagree!", but it gets bad when people instead respond "Oh really? So you're saying that X is Hitler huh? You are a terrible person who hates bunny rabbits!"
I mostly agree with her that the tropes she identifies are harmful in the sense they're likely to make women feel less welcome in gaming (which I consider harmful, because I think unless there's a direct biological or other similar reason I'd like women to feel comfortable and welcome everywhere men are and vice versa.) On CoD vs Mario I can't comment, but I suspect neither are high up in the lists of games popular with women collectively. I mostly disagree with her on the notion that gaming and media tropes are likely to make adults feel a particular way about women and therefore change how media consumers treat them.
Mostly though, I'm bemused by the insistence she hates games and implication she is a threat to those who enjoy them because I think the tropes she identifies are harmful to gamers because, well, they're tropes. Because they're tired cliches and we can do better and will get better games if we minimize the cliches, or at least try better takes on them in future. I would hope that hypothetical evil-sexist squiggleslash would see these videos as constructive and useful regardless of whether he cares about whether women should be presented as humans with personalities, or being objects to be fought over.
* Not literally 100, obviously, the show would be unwatchable if that were the case.
There's nothing in there that explicitly confirms she's trans, so I'm going to not make the assumption right now, especially as transphobia is being exploited by many on the Gamergate side. The fact she'd say apparently transphobic things (or else something she now realizes was offensive to transgendered people) makes me question the "Well, she had surgery of some kind and on one occasion it sounds like something a trans person would say!" narrative even if I accept your experience here. I'm not disagreeing it would be positive for trans people if those who are stood up about the subject, but with no evidence, and issues of privacy even if we decide things that aren't evidence are, it seems inappropriate to me to speculate.
The rest of your comments seem, to me, to be ways of trying to reword things in attack form. The bounty she's organized isn't 100% funded by her family? Well, no shit. And the reason this is important and shows she's bad is because...? Self aggrandizing? To a certain extent, but again, she's mad and she's not going to take it any more.
I don't think she's leaving a mess and I object to your characterization of those fighting Gamergate. Gamergate isn't simply a group of people who disagree with "SJWs", they're actively hostile and abusive to women. The origin of Gamergate is an attack on one woman for sleeping with someone other than her official boyfriend, apparently important because that one woman made a game a loud minority in the gaming community felt wasn't a true game and shouldn't be taken as seriously as it was. This came at a time when people like Anita Sarkeesian were getting abuse and even death threats for identifying common themes in video games that might be problematic to women from people who overwhelmingly overlapped with the first group.
If you can't call a group made up of people who abuse women, and people who support such abusers, without being told you're criticizing "anyone" who "disagrees" with SJWs, then what hope is there?
Remember, Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu have received abuse now for months (years, in Sarkeesian's case.) They log into Twitter and the first thing they see is a notification icon, and behind that notification icon are a bunch of messages, every single time, with people stating they hate you. Not people saying "I read your comment about the potential ramifications of certain female hostile tropes and I wish to state why you are wrong", but "DIAF WHORE" type stuff.
And every so often, they get a death threat too.
And they're not the only ones. They're just the three most famous targets for these assholes.
I'd agree with an assessment that Wu is arguably the least sympathetic of the three, if only because Quinn did nothing whatsoever to inject herself in this, and the things Sarkeesian "did" to "deserve" the attacks were overwhelmingly polite, friendly, and constructive, while Wu does seem to have a hostile edge to her - albeit it's difficult to find out what she was like before the abuse started.
But... I'm still sympathetic. The abuse Wu got was not self inflicted. The "Shut up if you don't want more, the police even agree with me" viewpoint is unacceptable. The bounty thing is awesome. And people are listening to her about sexism in gaming.
I don't think you can safely say her views in the past reflect her positions right now.
I'm also unaware of any confirmation to the GG-originated rumor she's trans, and the above would suggest she's not. (She's 6' 2", apparently, which is tall but hardly the basis of any sane theories about her birth sex.)
Frankly, I've heard it all, I grew up in a "feminist" household with the kinds of Feminist that give the term a bad name. Anyone living in East Oxford in the 1980s will know what I'm talking about - mobs that would descend and threaten men walking alone after dark because "they might be rapists", wymyn (or however you spelt it) who genuinely didn't think sex was ever consensual, that kind of shit. My mother was a part of this. They did some good work, I spent some time helping (as my mother's son) at a shelter for battered women. But these were fundamentally horrible people who were abusive towards men.
I've heard the entire spectrum of views on sexuality and sex/gender from that group. And often from the same people, given a year or two to sit down and think about what it is they stand for.
Wu? By comparison to what I've experienced, she's completely 100% normal. You need to knock it off. She's a little aggressive, driven in part by anger, but quite honestly, if you'd had to put up with months of being called a cunt (and similar) by anonymous strangers on Twitter or email, and then suddenly found that abuse turning into doxxing with death threats, you'd be a tad testy too.
I can't imagine going through that. I'm not going to second guess her, and if she has the money to put a bounty on the heads of these a-holes, more power to her.
What I'm glad she's not doing is remaining silent. That may be what the police advise. But a society in which people live in fear too scared to speak about controversial issues (FUCKING HELL, THIS IS CONTROVERSIAL? SERIOUSLY? WOMEN IN GAMING??!) is a society that's seriously screwed up. If the police are advising this, we need to rethink law enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
It works very well for most people. Google is popular precisely because that mode works well for most people. And virtually everyone I'm talking to right now, geek and non-geek alike, agrees Google's new search mode is shit.
Pro-tip: you can get the old useful Google back (temporarily, there's no way to save it as a default) by hitting Search Tools -> Change "All Results" to "Verbatim"
Why they don't let you make that the fucking default - in fact, WHY IT ISN'T THE DEFAULT - is anyone's guess.
Why not? They have money, and the people who urgently need it (as opposed to it being a nice to have) don't - get the people who spend $5,000 on a carbon frame to pay for the R&D and initial start-up costs, and then supply the people who need it as soon as you can afford to do so.
It makes sense. It sounds wrong, but grants for this kind of work aren't just readily available, and ultimately this means that the people who need the work get it.
I guess we can count ourselves lucky it was seals fouling up the experiment, at least they leave and don't mess up the surveys even more, unlike those damned sea lions.
There are still quite a few mobile devices that don't. Still, time should fix that, one hopes...
Quite I program desktop applications the same way. No fancy debuggers, and I use Notepad to write the source code. Then I print out the source code using an ordinary printer and hand compile the code into hex codes, which I input back into the system and write out as a .EXE using an Excel VBA Script program I wrote myself.
Anything else is just asking for trouble...
Yes, and Oracle lost that lawsuit...
(If they'd won I suspect the consequences for Java would have been disastrous anyway, the entire eco-system would have become toxic with any legal ruling that effectively says you can't modify Java in any way and release the results without Oracle's permission. I still remain amazed they took it that far.)
It's not too little. It's too late to prevent a full scale migration from Java, as the latter is too deeply entrenched within the enterprise (plus I doubt Android is going to go there soon), but it does change the dynamic.
Other than "Microsoft" (and .NET's rival is no longer nice cuddly Sun, but Oracle, so there's that...), none of that is true any more. And it's an extremely capable, versatile, system that is arguably one of the best things ever to come out of Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Java doesn't seem to have the momentum it once had, we're slowly seeing improvements but there's a sense I have (and maybe I'm wrong) that 99% of the new features promised for Java (x+1) are there to solve issues in Java (x). I frequently see amazing stuff in C# that frequently makes you wonder why we're still avoiding it for scripting languages.
This is good. It builds trust. It creates a two way dynamic between the FOSS and .NET communities that previously was awkward and revolved entirely around people obsessive about Microsoft's technology choices.
I'm very glad they did it.
Still, the new name they chose, DisneyApple, is unlikely to ever get confused with anything else...
Just a note: systemic discrimination operates independently of individual discrimination.
As an example, a business or industry that recruits heavily through word-of-mouth recommendations is likely to end up with a systematic racism problem, because even though the individuals within the system may be well meaning and totally non-racist, any existing disparity, however slight, in social or employment circles, will get cemented, or even amplified given a non-zero percentage of employees will discriminate, by such a strategy.
Given the number of documented and easy to find ways in which systematic racism and individual racism exists, it's not hard to believe someone claiming it doesn't is not being honest.
The clearest evidence that GamerGate is still primarily misogyny (remember: Baldwin coined the term promoting a video attacking a female game developer for having sex with people who weren't her boyfriend) is that GamerGaters still self-identify their "enemy" as being not journalists but "SJWs" - people concerned about the treatment of women within the gaming world.
You guys are also having problems coming up with a real case of problems in journalistic ethics to rally around - thus far the nearest you've had to an actual success (ie one that was real, not imaginary) was Gawker making a joke in bad taste... about GamerGate itself.
But you don't seem to be running out of women to try to force out of game development.
It isn't, which is why the quote doesn't include the word gamer, doesn't imply all gamers, and doesn't demonize gamers.
The article was about "Games culture" - and the quotes here are important, a non-existent or barely existent sales demographic that Alexander felt the games industry was wasting too much time aiming at. She was making the point that only a minority of gamers fit into that demographic.
You and the others who attacked Gamasutra for that story who claimed it was aimed at all gamers completely misread an article essentially saying "Only a tiny minority of gamers are misogynistic trollish jackasses, so stop aiming 90% of your games at misogynistic trollish jackasses" as meaning "All gamers are misogynistic trollish jackasses". What's amazing to me is that the people who seemed most offended at the characterization are, ironically, the gamers who are misogynistic trollish jackasses...
Two posts in and we already have the douchebag who decides that any attempt to deal with harassment is the same as dealing with offensive material.
Let me spell it out for you, in a way that means your tiny little mind understands: You want to say "Feminazis are ruining videogames, I want more tits please!" go right ahead. Shout it out loud! We'll think you're an idiot who doesn't understand what's actually being asked for, and sure many will be offended, but nobody's denying your right to.
On the other hand, "@madamemariecurie Fuck you and your science you should have stayed in the kitchen, I'm coming right over to your lab at 37 Rue de Nord, Paris 50123 to murder you and defile your body": that's what we want people in jail for.
We also want some kind of action (but nobody's calling for legal/criminal action except in the most extreme instances) against people who dogpile and take other online action designed to specifically target individuals with hate messages. Again - you can post "Women suck, men are better at everything" 100 times in your own Twitter account, but ensuring @madamemariecurie gets 50 messages a day calling her a c---, and using sock puppets and even like minded individuals to bypass blocks? We'd like online services to kick you off their networks in response to that.
That's all anyone is asking for. Not censorship, because censorship is the prevention of a viewpoint from being stated, not even the suppression of offensive opinions, but an end to online harassment.
Why is that so hard? Can you seriously not tell the difference between "Women are evil", "@madamemariecurie You are a c---", and "@madamecurie I am going to rape and kill you."
Are you that stupid?
Oh that's just an election promise, that doesn't mean anything!
Didn't see anything but I admit I might have missed it. Do you have a link? If he did it, why's he announcing it a second time today?
Hmmm, that sounds like it would best be implemented using some kind of cross platform networked app layer. Maybe we could describe forms and windows using some kind of XML-based language so it's familiar to programmers, perhaps with a lightweight OO scripting language tying it together, and some basic security checks to ensure that networked data doesn't accidentally leak from one source to another and with no access to files on the underlying device.
I get the impression that much of this was integrated into the browser because half the criticisms of Firefox came from people who had tools like Firebug installed - itself infamous for bloating the footprint of any browser it was running in.
I seriously doubt any of the dev tools that come built-in to Firefox, Chrome, or IE are doing much if anything to bloat them. What I suspect is happening is that webdevs themselves are making use of features en-mass that are turning out to have some disastrous memory side effects - unconstrained closures due to widespead jQuery use would be a good example.
If he were serious about it, he'd have announced this before the friggin' election.
This is just setting up a fight for the next couple of years that he fully expects to lose, but in a way that leaves the opposing side less popular. That's all.
Yes, but it's not a useful point in context. Nobody's arguing it's impossible to influence anyone using the written work or a useful graphic. What's being argued is that certain base behaviors (violence in particular) are influenced simply by showing them.
But there's no mechanism I can see that would be shared between interactive violence in Quake III Arena, and an ad for GEICO Insurance. If GEICO for some reason decided to build a video game where you prevented people from attacking you by signing up for insurance policies, they might get more sales than Progressive, because their name is on the game, but they probably wouldn't expand the insurance market at all.
Yes, there's a responsibility by those saying no link to justify their assertion, but there's also a responsibility by those saying there could be to come up with a reasonable cause and effect mechanism that specifically applies to the situation in hand. By just saying "Well, advertising affects behavior!" you're not actually identifying a mechanism involved, you're simply saying they're kinda similar because you can use similar words - which is always a dangerous argument to make.
I'm not saying there aren't things in common, what I'm saying is that there are sufficient differences in the dynamic that you can't apply a study researching the links between violence and video games with the sexism and video games - there's nothing to suggest that the similarities are where the lack of a link would show itself.
Violence is encouraged by many direct and immediate factors, such as high levels of stress. If video games relieve that stress, they may discourage violence. Additionally violence in games is (almost always) shown as a necessity only during certain extreme situations, usually where your own life is under threat from the same things that you are trying to kill.
Neither of these dynamics apply to sexism. You don't relieve your "urge" to pinch your secretary's butt by sitting in a virtual strip bar. You don't relieve an "urge" to wolf whistle at a passer by by "rescuing" a helpless two-dimensional damsel in order to make her your own. You don't relieve either of these things because there's no urge there to begin with (or maybe I'm projecting, but I've never seen either as something I've felt an urge to do.) Additionally, sitting in a virtual strip bar in the games that do it isn't accompanied by some kind of implied justification in the same way as violence is.
Again, lest it's not clear, I'm not saying I agree that sexism in video games causes sexism in real life. I think people can figure out the difference between representative screen objects and real, living breathing, human beings quite easily, and sexism is more a problem of upbringing accompanied by the power dynamics people see in actual real life.
But I don't think you can prove that by showing a study in violent video games that shows violence is A-OK.
Which aspect of advertising? Because 99% of advertising is simply about ensuring people have heard of $BRANDNAME (or don't forget about it.)
Yes, there's a lot of shaping the message. There's a reason no major advertisers use maggots or cockroaches as their spokesmascots. But then, most games that present violence are:
1. Not reminding you it exists. Pretty certain you already know about it.
2. Not sugar coating it. I don't think anyone's ever played a violent video game and said afterwards "Woah! Violence is way better than I thought it was!" Victims of violence in video games are generally shown as worse off, the necessity of violence is usually restricted to cases where there's a higher principle involved, and people who use it are generally required to either justify it, or be seen as terrible people.
I don't agree sexism in games causes sexism either, but I don't think you can link it to a "violence in video games" study.
Sexism is about attitudes and how people are viewed. Violence? Only partially. And arguably a case can be made that violence in video games could decrease violence in real life because it provides an outlet for aggression. As in "My boss was an ass to me today, I'm going to take it out on some virtual cops rather than deal with my anger issues the traditional way".
Whereas it's hard to make that argument work with sexism. "Oh, I asploded a stripper on the way to rescuing a 2D princess who will be my property when I get her, now in real life I'm going to treat men and women the same at the office and stop sexually harassing passers by because I got my fix from Grand Hitman Mario." Yeah. Doesn't really work, does it.
I think minds are a little more complex than those who look for causal links between sexism in media and sexism in real life claim, but I wouldn't think for a moment a study in violence in media is somehow relevant to the issue of attitudes towards roles seen in media.
Well, kinda, it suggests there's conflict. The point is right in the title is the that this is about Tropes opposing Women. Anyone watching an episode sees the title, and then the disclaimer. They then see Sarkeesian talking about tropes, individual tropes, and insofar as individual video games are mentioned it's virtually always to show (a) 100* screencaptures of the trope being employed in 100 different games to prove it is a trope and (b) a sequence from two or three games, or description of how the trope manifests itself in one or two games, illustrating the key features of the trope.
Which is, whether you're right or wrong, a reasonable and appropriate response. I'm not trying to make any point implying Sarkeesian is always right. What I am saying is that she makes a statement, and from it her "critics" come up with interpretations of what she meant that are completely off-base and aren't even reasonable extrapolations of what words she's used.
To have a sane conversation, when someone says "X=Z", you can reasonably say "X is not Z! I disagree!", but it gets bad when people instead respond "Oh really? So you're saying that X is Hitler huh? You are a terrible person who hates bunny rabbits!"
I mostly agree with her that the tropes she identifies are harmful in the sense they're likely to make women feel less welcome in gaming (which I consider harmful, because I think unless there's a direct biological or other similar reason I'd like women to feel comfortable and welcome everywhere men are and vice versa.) On CoD vs Mario I can't comment, but I suspect neither are high up in the lists of games popular with women collectively. I mostly disagree with her on the notion that gaming and media tropes are likely to make adults feel a particular way about women and therefore change how media consumers treat them.
Mostly though, I'm bemused by the insistence she hates games and implication she is a threat to those who enjoy them because I think the tropes she identifies are harmful to gamers because, well, they're tropes. Because they're tired cliches and we can do better and will get better games if we minimize the cliches, or at least try better takes on them in future. I would hope that hypothetical evil-sexist squiggleslash would see these videos as constructive and useful regardless of whether he cares about whether women should be presented as humans with personalities, or being objects to be fought over.
* Not literally 100, obviously, the show would be unwatchable if that were the case.
There's nothing in there that explicitly confirms she's trans, so I'm going to not make the assumption right now, especially as transphobia is being exploited by many on the Gamergate side. The fact she'd say apparently transphobic things (or else something she now realizes was offensive to transgendered people) makes me question the "Well, she had surgery of some kind and on one occasion it sounds like something a trans person would say!" narrative even if I accept your experience here. I'm not disagreeing it would be positive for trans people if those who are stood up about the subject, but with no evidence, and issues of privacy even if we decide things that aren't evidence are, it seems inappropriate to me to speculate.
The rest of your comments seem, to me, to be ways of trying to reword things in attack form. The bounty she's organized isn't 100% funded by her family? Well, no shit. And the reason this is important and shows she's bad is because...? Self aggrandizing? To a certain extent, but again, she's mad and she's not going to take it any more.
I don't think she's leaving a mess and I object to your characterization of those fighting Gamergate. Gamergate isn't simply a group of people who disagree with "SJWs", they're actively hostile and abusive to women. The origin of Gamergate is an attack on one woman for sleeping with someone other than her official boyfriend, apparently important because that one woman made a game a loud minority in the gaming community felt wasn't a true game and shouldn't be taken as seriously as it was. This came at a time when people like Anita Sarkeesian were getting abuse and even death threats for identifying common themes in video games that might be problematic to women from people who overwhelmingly overlapped with the first group.
If you can't call a group made up of people who abuse women, and people who support such abusers, without being told you're criticizing "anyone" who "disagrees" with SJWs, then what hope is there?
Remember, Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu have received abuse now for months (years, in Sarkeesian's case.) They log into Twitter and the first thing they see is a notification icon, and behind that notification icon are a bunch of messages, every single time, with people stating they hate you. Not people saying "I read your comment about the potential ramifications of certain female hostile tropes and I wish to state why you are wrong", but "DIAF WHORE" type stuff.
And every so often, they get a death threat too.
And they're not the only ones. They're just the three most famous targets for these assholes.
I'd agree with an assessment that Wu is arguably the least sympathetic of the three, if only because Quinn did nothing whatsoever to inject herself in this, and the things Sarkeesian "did" to "deserve" the attacks were overwhelmingly polite, friendly, and constructive, while Wu does seem to have a hostile edge to her - albeit it's difficult to find out what she was like before the abuse started.
But... I'm still sympathetic. The abuse Wu got was not self inflicted. The "Shut up if you don't want more, the police even agree with me" viewpoint is unacceptable. The bounty thing is awesome. And people are listening to her about sexism in gaming.
https://twitter.com/Spacekatga...
I don't think you can safely say her views in the past reflect her positions right now.
I'm also unaware of any confirmation to the GG-originated rumor she's trans, and the above would suggest she's not. (She's 6' 2", apparently, which is tall but hardly the basis of any sane theories about her birth sex.)
Frankly, I've heard it all, I grew up in a "feminist" household with the kinds of Feminist that give the term a bad name. Anyone living in East Oxford in the 1980s will know what I'm talking about - mobs that would descend and threaten men walking alone after dark because "they might be rapists", wymyn (or however you spelt it) who genuinely didn't think sex was ever consensual, that kind of shit. My mother was a part of this. They did some good work, I spent some time helping (as my mother's son) at a shelter for battered women. But these were fundamentally horrible people who were abusive towards men.
I've heard the entire spectrum of views on sexuality and sex/gender from that group. And often from the same people, given a year or two to sit down and think about what it is they stand for.
Wu? By comparison to what I've experienced, she's completely 100% normal. You need to knock it off. She's a little aggressive, driven in part by anger, but quite honestly, if you'd had to put up with months of being called a cunt (and similar) by anonymous strangers on Twitter or email, and then suddenly found that abuse turning into doxxing with death threats, you'd be a tad testy too.
I can't imagine going through that. I'm not going to second guess her, and if she has the money to put a bounty on the heads of these a-holes, more power to her.
What I'm glad she's not doing is remaining silent. That may be what the police advise. But a society in which people live in fear too scared to speak about controversial issues (FUCKING HELL, THIS IS CONTROVERSIAL? SERIOUSLY? WOMEN IN GAMING??!) is a society that's seriously screwed up. If the police are advising this, we need to rethink law enforcement.