# Gamergate
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [September 5, 2014, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596 "2014-09-05T17:43:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 39
### Author:  [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2014, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/762 "2014-10-11T23:53:27Z")
> [@Acsenray](#):
>
> This sentence, like all your others, seems to have been chosen from a hat without any regard to its relevance or meaning.
Leigh Alexander is a game journalist who regularly uses her writing to discuss gender roles in video games and within the industry itself. I think she is much MUCH better at it than Sarkeesian. What’s so hard about that?
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### Author:  [@grude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grude)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/763 "2014-10-12T01:18:13Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#):
>
> But then she looks directly into the camera and scolds Nintendo (and Shigeru Miyamoto) for daring to treat women in video games this way and start the whole sexism train rolling. She never once comes back around to the fact that Nintendo was A) parodying a movie from the 30s and B) referencing some of the earliest films in cinema history. Talking about society embracing these tropes for nearly a century is a seriously important part of the puzzle. But it’s pushed aside so she can tsk tsk at game publishers.
I can’t be the only 80s kid here that remembers playing Metroid on a NES before the internet right? At the end when the badass alien blasting Samus Aran is revealed to be a woman, how was that for challenging assumptions?
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### Author:  [@grude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grude)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/764 "2014-10-12T01:20:00Z")
> [@Leaper](#):
>
> I’m really really surprised no one has used the info revealed in these kinds of campaigns to commit more serious crimes. It’s not like the message boards can filter out the truly crazy/sociopathic.
That would require them to go outside, maybe even gasp interact with someone.
I’m curious is a single piece of snail mail hate has been sent? I’m guessing no because they’d have to ask their mom to buy them a stamp.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/765 "2014-10-12T01:39:34Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#):
>
> First of all, 1979 was quite different from today.
Yes, but perhaps not in the way you’re imagining. The ERA was an ongoing issue in 1979, and in general the backlash against feminism that developed in the late 80s-early 90s hadn’t really hit its stride yet.
> [@](#):
>
> Secondly, holding a King Kong parody (which did see a major theatrical remake just a few years earlier) to some kind of loftier standard because it happened to be a game is absurd. Sarkeesian wants to have a discussion about culture as a whole, but wants to limit to games, and cherrypicks games as offenders seemingly at random.
I disagree with some of Sarkeesian’s points, but not because she’s cherrypicking, or because she’ limiting her analysis to games. Both approaches are appropriate: she’s allowed not only to focus her criticism on games, but to focus it on specific games. Folks criticizing cultural injustices are probably going to do a better job of their criticism if they focus it on one aspect of culture, whether that aspect is soap operas, bluegrass music, comic books, orchestral hiring practices, or video games; Sarkeesian’s working in the field she’s most familiar with. And criticism within a subculture is in turn going to be better if it’s specific rather than general, if it addresses Bioshock 2 rather than amorphous games as a whole.
I disagree with some of her specific criticisms, but it’s the specifics in which I think she’s wrong, not in her approach.
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### Author:  [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/766 "2014-10-12T02:04:14Z")
The main problem I have with Sarkeesian I have with a lot of feminist critics. It’s that she insists the games are always **wrong** for using these tropes.
I find this a bit heavy handed. There’s literally nothing wrong with killing a female character to motivate a male character, or having a princess that needs to be rescued. These are completely harmless tropes that can offer benefit to the story.
The issue with these tropes isn’t that they’re bad, it’s that from a statistical point of view they’re used far too often. Like, The Last of Us killed Joel’s daughter in the opening and I saw more than a few places raising hell about it, despite the fact that it was the setup for the game to give us an amazing female co-lead. Not only that, but a lot of them criticized the fact that Ellie is rescued at the end, while ignoring the fact that she saves Joel several times as well.
As used, there was nothing wrong with the damsel in distress **or** the women in refrigerators trope here. The only issue is that it contributes a single point of data to a much wider array of cultural norms. However, its use of the tropes is much less of a problem than it is in, say, games like Mario, where it’s the **whole plot**. Especially because it’s used to kick off a story that’s pretty damn good to female characters. In fact, of the two characters we see in a position of power or leadership, both are women.
It’s a lot like the Bechdel test. It’s entirely possible for a movie to be good, and even feminist, even without passing it. (Say it only has two characters – a man and a woman; a father daughter movie; etc). It’s only the number of movies that don’t pass the test compared to the reverse test that makes it an issue, and it’s not really fair to criticize every movie that fails to pass it.
The feeling I always get from her, and similar critics, is “these tropes are wrong and we will criticize your game/movie/book if you use them.” I think it’s a bit daft and shortsighted.
And, of course, there are some tropes that aren’t really excusable regardless of the current cultural climate – portraying domestic abuse as okay or normal, etc. I just feel it goes to far to say all these tropes are inherently bad.
(That’s not to say she doesn’t have points with similar things like “male as default”, this only applies to a subset of her criticisms).
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/767 "2014-10-12T02:29:39Z")
> [@Jragon](#):
>
> The main problem I have with Sarkeesian I have with a lot of feminist critics. It’s that she insists the games are always **wrong** for using these tropes.
I don’t think she always says that. I think sometimes she’s suggesting that the tropes are harmful in and of themselves, but her most common complaint is that there are very few instances in which certain genres of video games don’t employ some trope that objectifies or robs women of their agency.
That’s the thing you hear most often in her videos, that these tropes are employed so often that they overwhelm some genres of games and that they are lazy crutches used by game designers.
And I pretty much agree with her.
For example, I think that the trope that gives a victorious player the love or affection or body of a woman as a reward simply for winning or for saving her is per se a twisted way to see the world and I see no good reason for games to do that.
Similarly, I don’t see any good reason why brutalized women who are also sexualized should be used as “set decoration” for a game.
I’m thinking specifically of a game that appeared in one of her videos in which the player is going through what looks like a strip club or brothel. There are dead men and women all over the place, but the dead women are invariably displayed in a sexualized manner and the men are not. That’s just sick.
In any case, she consistently pleads for diversity and alternative depictions of women and a more sophisticated, nuanced, and sensitive approach should be taken. I don’t think she once has said in her videos that certain things should be entirely banned.
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### Author:  [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/768 "2014-10-12T02:39:27Z")
I don’t think she’s wrong. I think if I were to actually talk with Anita, she’d agree with me on a lot of what I said. It’s just an inherent problem of focusing on specific examples when doing this sort of critique. On one hard, it’s very difficult to make a good critique series without focusing on any specific examples. On the other hand, it’s easy to make the point come across that you’re condemning **specific** games for doing things that aren’t really that bad on their own.
I give her the benefit of the doubt on a lot of it, but whenever I watch the videos I feel her arguments are just too specific. It may just be me, but it always feels like she criticizing each specific game for failing to subvert tired tropes when it wouldn’t be a problem if only 10 or 20% of those games used it.
> [@Acsenray](#):
>
> For example, I think that the trope that gives a victorious player the love or affection or body of a woman as a reward simply for winning or for saving her is per se a twisted way to see the world and I see no good reason for games to do that.
Well, there’s “damsel in distress” users that don’t do this. The unfortunate thing is, and I can’t remember if Anita in specific did this, some critics allow works that simply have a man saving a woman or girl for any reason get thrown under the bus along with them. Or even works that have a man save a woman as a minor part of a more even overall character narrative.
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/769 "2014-10-12T02:50:30Z")
> [@Acsenray](#):
>
> For example, I think that the trope that gives a victorious player the love or affection or body of a woman as a reward simply for winning or for saving her is per se a twisted way to see the world and I see no good reason for games to do that.
Wellbut. Even modern video games don’t exist in a cultural vacuum, and literature and art associated with epic genres pretty much throughout recorded history have used the trope of receiving the love or affection or body of a woman as a reward for male victory.
I agree that doesn’t make it ethically right, but it does make it culturally significant. If a designer wants to invoke a sort of “classical epic feel” in a game, the trope of woman-as-prize is clearly a natural part of that.
Of course, I think Sarkeesian is perfectly justified in criticizing that trope if she wants to, and I don’t think the fact that such a trope has been immortalized in great works of art in the past should make it immune from criticism when it appears in modern forms.
And though I’m not a gamer myself, I could certainly see how a lot of gamers (male and female both) would find it kind of dull or annoying to have the woman-as-prize motif always substituting for more interesting and varied ways to represent female characters. I just think you go a bit far when you say there’s **no** good reason to invoke the woman-as-prize motif.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/770 "2014-10-12T03:19:49Z")
> [@Acsenray](#):
>
> I’m thinking specifically of a game that appeared in one of her videos in which the player is going through what looks like a strip club or brothel. There are dead men and women all over the place, but the dead women are invariably displayed in a sexualized manner and the men are not. That’s just sick.
I think that was Bioshock 2. And that criticism was one that I specifically thought was invalid. The idea was that, IIRC, there was a brothel full of prostitutes and johns, and some psycho came through with a speargun and committed a massacre. The corposes of the johns were depicted in street clothes, while the corpses of the prostitutes were depicted in nighties.
First, none of the images were sexy: they were horror images, depicted I thought in specifically unsexy ways. But the difference between male and female depictions was a necessary one given the story: of course the johns in a brothel aren’t dressed up in a sexy manner, and of course the prostitutes are wearing something filmy.
This scene could have been avoided by avoiding a massacre in a brothel, sure. But every scene in the game was basically the scene of some sort of terrible violence, so I’m not sure that’s a legitimate request. Avoiding it by having the prostitutes wearing street clothes, or having the johns wearing sexy clothes, would just be weird. (And yes, I know that the johns could’ve been naked–but none of the characters were naked, and most of the massacre was in the brothel’s main room).
Sometimes the disparate treatment of male and female characters in an alt-history game is a nod to the historical treatment, as in this different clothing on characters in a brothel. I’m not sure that’s a problem, especially not when the characters are as non-erotic as the ones were in that section of the game.
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### Author:  [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/771 "2014-10-12T03:36:07Z")
Wait, that was her complaint about Bioshock 2? Not the state of Rapture in 1968, not the whole Big Daddy/Little Sister/Big Sister dynamic, not the craziness of Lamb, but that she didn’t like the mass murder in the brothel in the Objectivist underwater city?
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/772 "2014-10-12T03:40:48Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> First, none of the images were sexy: they were horror images, depicted I thought in specifically unsexy ways. But the difference between male and female depictions was a necessary one given the story: of course the johns in a brothel aren’t dressed up in a sexy manner, and of course the prostitutes are wearing something filmy.
I don’t think it’s that simple. You can show murdered prostitutes dressed in revealing clothes in a variety of manners, not all of which will be so obviously sexualized. The men were often crumpled, in shadows. The women were in full light and their bodies were posed in provocative positions. Yes, it was horror, but it was obvious that it was a very sexualized horror.
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### Author:  [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/773 "2014-10-12T03:41:22Z")
> [@asterion](#):
>
> Wait, that was her complaint about Bioshock 2? Not the state of Rapture in 1968, not the whole Big Daddy/Little Sister/Big Sister dynamic, not the craziness of Lamb, but that she didn’t like the mass murder in the brothel in the Objectivist underwater city?
Well, she didn’t do an episode on Bioshock 2 itself. I believe the episode was specifically about violence against women in video games. She may well have other, stronger criticisms that weren’t relevant to that video.
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/774 "2014-10-12T03:42:21Z")
> [@asterion](#):
>
> Wait, that was her complaint about Bioshock 2? Not the state of Rapture in 1968, not the whole Big Daddy/Little Sister/Big Sister dynamic, not the craziness of Lamb, but that she didn’t like the mass murder in the brothel in the Objectivist underwater city?
She doesn’t pick a game and then rank every single potentially objectionable thing about it. She picks a theme that is common as an element in many games and then uses aspects of particular games to illustrate those themes.
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### Author:  [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/775 "2014-10-12T03:47:36Z")
> [@Jragon](#):
>
> Well, she didn’t do an episode on Bioshock 2 itself. I believe the episode was specifically about violence against women in video games. She may well have other, stronger criticisms that weren’t relevant to that video.
Still, that’s not exactly, say, basically all the women in Duke Nukem 3D, who are either strippers or trapped in some sort of alien pods. If she didn’t use that as an example (and she may have, I don’t know) then I’d find including something like Bioshock 2 even less persuasive.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2014, 11:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/776 "2014-10-12T11:48:07Z")
> [@Acsenray](#):
>
> I don’t think it’s that simple. You can show murdered prostitutes dressed in revealing clothes in a variety of manners, not all of which will be so obviously sexualized. The men were often crumpled, in shadows. The women were in full light and their bodies were posed in provocative positions. Yes, it was horror, but it was obvious that it was a very sexualized horror.
Really, provocative positions? IIRC, they were mostly hanging from the wall, where they’d been impaled by spears, just as the male characters were. Maybe I’m misremembering, but again, even when I watched Sarkeesian’s video, I didn’t see them as being at all eroticized. (And to be clear, some of her other examples, e.g., the ads for Hitman, were clearly eroticized–I’m not just objecting to the general idea, but to this specific example).
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### Author:  [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2014, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/777 "2014-10-14T22:52:32Z")
[And, more death threats against Sarkeesian.](http://www.standard.net/Police/2014/10/14/Utah-State-University-student-threatens-act-of-terror-if-feminist.html) This time it’s a threat to shoot up Utah State University if she’s allow to give her talk there tomorrow.
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### Author:  [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2014, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/778 "2014-10-15T00:16:54Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#):
>
> [And, more death threats against Sarkeesian.](http://www.standard.net/Police/2014/10/14/Utah-State-University-student-threatens-act-of-terror-if-feminist.html) This time it’s a threat to shoot up Utah State University if she’s allow to give her talk there tomorrow.
I’m going to say it again. These douchebags are going to jail en masse very soon and it’s going to be _sweet_.
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### Author:  [@Ibanez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibanez)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2014, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/779 "2014-10-15T01:39:04Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#):
>
> I’m going to say it again. These douchebags are going to jail en masse very soon and it’s going to be _sweet_.
If they ever track them down. I believe authorities have yet to track down and charge anyone responsible for these supposed threats directed at her. She’s received a couple so far, and no one has ever been arrested. Which is odd.
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### Author:  [@Weedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weedy)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2014, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/780 "2014-10-15T01:59:04Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#):
>
> [And, more death threats against Sarkeesian.](http://www.standard.net/Police/2014/10/14/Utah-State-University-student-threatens-act-of-terror-if-feminist.html) This time it’s a threat to shoot up Utah State University if she’s allow to give her talk there tomorrow.
You’d think he’d realise he is just giving her more publicity.
---
### Author:  [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2014, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gamergate/697596/781 "2014-10-15T02:30:34Z")
Latest news is that USU has cancelled Sarkeesian’s speech because Utah state law prevents them from barring concealed weapons from the venue. Freedom!
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