In a related topic, “Internet Trolls Are Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Sadists. A new study shows that internet trolls really are just terrible human beings.”
The ending take-away from that article – “it is your suffering that brings them pleasure, so the best thing you can do is ignore them” – is the diametric opposite of how they’re actually being “handled” in all this.
Even prior to the whole “had to leave my house” thing, I thought that Sarkeesian’s collecting of offensive tweets and comments like they were trading cards and posting them so everyone could see how horrible they were was either (a) completely self-defeating since the trolls just fed and delighted off that or else (b) incredibly cynical and manipulative since she would receive an outpouring of support while ensuring that the horrible comments would just keep on coming for the next time she needed to go to the support well. If she receives a legitimate threat then she’s correct in contacting the authorities. But the posting and retweeting of the “you’re a horrible cunt” style tweets isn’t anything the police are going to act on and just serve to reward the people sending them.
If people ignored trolls this thread would have been one post long.
As for Sarkeesian’s handling of trolls, your “incredibly cynical and manipulative” looks like “reasonable and effective” to me. If it was one or two cranks making YouTube, sure, ignore them. Nobody cares. If you’re dealing with motivated and organized cranks who are doing a bunch of borderline criminal acts, ignoring them isn’t working. Maybe Sarkeesian baited trolls into going too far by publicizing their actions, I think I’ve seen that accusation. Fair play if she did.
Sure, if her goal is to farm abusive comments to stay in the gaming news and get a bunch of money. If her goal is to have people not make those comments though, it’s a pretty dismal failure.
If this thread was one post long, I don’t think we would have suffered much for its loss 
I knew I could count on you to completely miss the salient point. So let me say it again, in words of mostly one syllable:
I. DON’T. CARE. ABOUT. ZOE. QUINN.
I had never heard her name before this stupid bullshit erupted. I have never played her game. I don’t care who she’s slept with, what she’s tweeted, how many and what manner of goats she’s blown. This is not about her.
I have never played Call Of Duty, Halo, or Grand Theft Auto. Never read any video game journalism, never heard of most of the organizations, companies, or websites mentioned in this thread, never seen Anita Sarkeesian’s critiques of video games. Video games are simply not part of my world, capisce? This is not about them.
No, this is about the fact that you, bosbfdsfd, have chosen to take your stand with a pack of rabid Internet shitheels who think that publishing credit card and bank account information, harassing friends and family, posting violent rape fantasies, and phoning in bomb threats is an appropriate response to a woman who said things on the Internet that they don’t like. And the fact that you dismiss this as simply “a campaign to embarrass and ridicule” her suggests to me that you think this is perfectly okay.
Which tells me all I need to know about you.
Latest happenings:
- Alexa rankings show a large decline for all implicated sites, while The Escapist, which is more neutral, sees and 8% increase in traffic;
- In related news, The Escapist was taken down yesterday by a DDoS attack allegedly from a feminist hacker group just for allowing discussion of the issue, TFYC were also victim of hacking attempts, and also several gamergate people were doxxed, including Polar Roller;
- Chat logs from 4chan mod chat were also leaked, showing moot claiming to have received death threats from the SJWs, and more normal threats against 4chan from both Cracked.com and a feminist hacker group which, along with advice from Sarkeesian herself, led to him banning all discussion of GG;
- further moot information: he is besties with no less than the VP of operations at Gawker media, and fucking a girl SJW from Gawker who wrote her thesis on him. Fuck, Sarkeesians tissue-paper thin, thought-free thesis starts to look scholarly next to “my boy toy’s so dweamy”. Some might regard that, or Quinn fucking a 4chan mod as relevant, but I’m sure it’s all just slut-shaming. It’s not. Moot is a whore, not a slut.
Dork: Open letter to the gaming community | by Andreas Zecher | Medium
Of course the people who actually signed it include those not on the secret mailing list, like a board game company and mass-murderer Anders Breivik, but it’s as credible as anything else put out by your SJW crowd.
So I finally watched that AEI video. I don’t get the kerfluffle. She never painted them as “professional victims”. She did not try to minimize the threats they got. In fact, what she’s been saying is pretty much right on-point with what many of the critics of Sarkeesian have been saying - there are a few good points, but they cherry-pick, games are marketed foremost to men because men are the predominate buyers of these kinds of games, and criticizing the hardcore scene for catering mostly to men is like criticizing Oprah and The View for catering mostly to women. She certainly doesn’t act like the threats didn’t happen; merely that they are about as indicative of “gamer culture” as the noise a few thousand people would make could be.
So I won’t bother with any other points, then, even though I still disagree.
No, /v/ did it because they hated Zoe Quinn and Zoe Quinn was who TFYC blamed for what happened to them. You admit it yourself that the whole idea was to spite Quinn.
And the reason why /v/ hated Quinn was the misogynist dump by her boyfriend. They hated her before they heard of anything with TFYC, which means they didn’t hate her for what she did there.
Furthermore, the agreed upon deal allowed them to create a character, one Vivian James, who pretty much everyone has decried as misogynist and sexist. So even if some people who donated did it for good reasons, that doesn’t change the fact that TFYC got in bed with the misogynists from /v/.
Any money given to spite Zoe Quinn was because of the boyfriend’s letter, and the boyfriend’s letter was misogynist. /v/ hated Quinn because they accepted the misogyny. There’s no way to get around the fact that TFYC got the money they did because of the misogynists at /v/.
Hang out at 4chan and even /v/ all you want. But if you join in the hate campaign against Quinn, you are joining a misogynist group. It started with misogyny and continues to promote misogyny. As long as that is so, there can be no legitimate gripes.
Next time they want to attack someone, they should maybe not do it because they believe she is some sort of prostitute. When that is your foundation, everything else still misogyny.
OMFG. The irony is so good! The SJWs in this case WERE THE PEOPLE FROM /v/. Think about it. They saw an “injustice” from what the ex-boyfriend posted, and then they set out to attack her in any way possible. They were warriors for social justice.
You, in your inanity, almost actually described what happened.
(And, whew. I thought this was posted by the new troll, and I’d actually have to respond to him. And, yes, the fact that blindboyard isn’t the troll in this thread astounds me, too.)
That’s a circular argument.
And that’s a false equivalence. Heavy consumers of TV, male or female and everything in between, have a vast spectre of TV to choose from. Heavy consumer of VGs, particularly multiplayer ones, *cannot *get away from the toxic aspects of “gamer culture”. BOYS ONLY, NO GURLS ALLOWED !
If there was a “video gaming Oprah” (don’t ask me what that’d look like) there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place, would there ?
Also, when she said, in full avuncular condescension mode, “Do boys like to have objectified women in their games ? Of course ! They’re boys, and that’s fine !”, I was rolling my eyes so hard I think I saw my throat. Fuck her.
Gish gallop, Gish gallop, Gish gallop. I wouldn’t bet my life savings on it, but I’m altogether pretty comfortable that this is more of the same bunch of lies and libel. There’s no reason to investigate any more of these uncited and unsupported Gishy claims.
It’s astonishing that you can see half the reason your cite is so unsupportive of your claim, and still cite it.
- The journalists DIDN’T SIGN IT! Making this a scandal about journalists is cretinous.
- It’s not a letter of support specifically for Quinn. Making this a scandal about a letter of support for Quinn is moronic.
- The content of the letter–advising people not to harass or threaten people–is wholly 100% uncontroversial except to emotionally stunted sociopaths like yourself.
You cited this letter to support your claim that Orland’s letter of support “wasn’t rejected, was sent, is available on the internet and was signed by most of the people on that list.” You’re almost certainly a liar, and are absolutely certainly a terrible little moron.
(crap, that’s spectrum, not spectre in post #510. False friend.)
I’m sorry, you’re mistaken.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kotaku.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/polygon.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/arstechnica.com
You don’t think it was a motivating factor? I don’t give a shit about Quinn’s actions with her boyfriend, but the stuff that went down between her and TFYC got me involved in the issue. I think for a lot of them it was similar.
Wait, what? She’s almost defined by her “just being another girl”. I mean, obviously if you start from the assumption that 4chan is doing this purely to spite feminists, then they could have made a version of Andrea Dworkin who cures cancer and solves world hunger by solving gender inequality and the character would still be seen as sexist. To quote AngryGamer:
(In fact, the whole article isn’t bad.)
Vivian James as a character is a quintessential gamer girl. A decent person not looking to be a role model who happens to be into hardcore gaming. The only thing “misogynist” about this is where it came from. Calling VJ “misogynist” is like calling “The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich” racist because the artist was Hitler. Also, who other than Vice has called her out as sexist? Because I looked and I’m not seeing a whole lot.
“Some”. Anyone want to quantify that? The end result was that we have a new female character who is nothing if not “feminist-friendly” (because one of the stated goals on /v/ was “Let’s really throw them for a loop by not making the character horrible”) and a project which is great for women being funded. So what if it was to spite Zoe Quinn? It’s like if a bunch of MRAs donated large amounts of money to Komen to spite Sydney Singer and Soma Grismaijer. And this is keeping in mind that TFYC always would have had the option to say, “No, that character is unacceptable” if the character looked and acted like a cross between Ivy, Poison, and New 52 Starfire (or, for that matter, had the personality that many people associate with Sarkeesian, Watson, or the like), and refused to insert the character until /v/ came up with something legitimate that wouldn’t make a feminist scream bloody murder.
What does it even mean to say that they “got in bed with them”? They didn’t turn away their donation? Let me make something clear. If I was running a program to help black people, and got a huge donation from Stormfront, I’d be suspicious, but if I thought they were terrible people, the last thing I’d do is give them their money back. What does that accomplish? Now my program to help minorities is poorer and the people who want to demolish minorities are richer. What the hell does it accomplish? “You’re awful people, so we won’t take your money” seems kinda dumb. Never mind that we have no way of saying for what reason which people who donated did what they did!
Again, to clarify. The end result is that /v/ saved a female-oriented games design project and created a solid female character. At that point, I pretty much don’t care what the reasons were. The people getting upset about this are acting completely unreasonable.
Right. Because /v/ (and /pol/) is a hivemind. :rolleyes:
Eh, fair enough. That doesn’t make it wrong. The same thing applies to, say, pro sports, bodybuilding, and any number of male-dominated fields. It doesn’t make it right, but from a capitalist sense, it makes no sense to spend a lot of money marketing to people who seem disinterested to begin with. Yes, that’s depressing, and yes, that should change, but I can’t really blame the AAA market for not sticking out their neck more often. They’re big, lumbering corporations with extremely expensive products who are notoriously afraid to take risks.
Point taken.
Those weren’t her exact words, and part of the problem here is that “objectified women” is part of the damn objection in the first place! In fact, her exact words are a lot closer to “Do male gamers like to have male heroes and sexy women in there games? Of course. Does that have anything to do with them being, well, male?” Which is a very different statement!
In fact, if you examine the video she chose for that statement, it’s a character from Lollipop Chainsaw. Now, Juliet Starling obviously provides some quite nifty eye-candy, but “objectified”? If you’re going to claim that she’s “objectified” because her costume is revealing and her figure is nice, then essentially you can’t have an attractive woman in a video game without her being considered a sex-object, because Starling has a defined personality, is totally in control for most of the game, and is a total badass. See also: FemFreq’s ludicrous critique of Bayonetta. The fact that men prefer women to look like Mai Sharanui rather than Roxy Hardbottom does not mean the women who are attractive exist solely to be objectified!
Actually, from a capitalist standpoint that’s a gigantic untapped market - the essence of the consumer society is to make you want to buy shit you don’t need.
Even the comic industry is tentatively starting to grok that - hence the appearance of gay characters, non-WASP non-stereotypes characters, Thor becoming female and even a handful of superheroines gasp not being relegated 100% to being T&A vehicles any more.
I totally can. Watch me :). I also blame the industry for not taking any risks from game design or artistic standpoints. Motherfucking suits killed the medium as they were saving it, man. Screw the Man.
I (and many gamers my age) don’t particularly like overly sexy/sexualized women in my games. The “chainmail bikini” effect earns an eyeroll, not a wolf whistle. Blatant fanservice turns me *away *from a game, not towards it. Does that have anything to do with me being, well, a *grown-ass man *?
See, that would be exactly what I’m talking about, because I really have a love/disgust relationship with this game.
On the one hand, yes, it’s pretty fun, it doesn’t take itself seriously, I totally grok the whole absurd valley girl against Heavy Metal Zombie Satan spin. And I actually enjoy Juliet Starling’s ditzy character and her relationship w/ her insane family and boyfriend’s head. It’s all good, mindless absurdist gruesome fun.
On the *other *hand, does the character gain anything from the skimpy cheerleader design, the constant upskirt/underboobage camera angles and so forth (and her default skin is really the least offensive of them, because some of the unlockable alternate costumes are just a giant pile of NOPE) ? Would her character lose any appeal if she wore, say, a pair of designer jeans and some pop-rock t-shirt ? Like a real high school popular person type ? So yes, she’s definitely objectified and overtly sexualized.
Yes, yes, Mr Gunn & associates, I get it, ha ha, it’s satirical, it’s deliberate, it’s all a meta directorial joke, it’s a commentary on the absurdity and tastefulness of the cheerleader concept and American high school culture… BUT YOU’RE STILL DOING IT YOURSELF, ASSHOLE. And a large part of your playerbase, not to mention your own fucking marketing department, is playing it deadly straight !
There are parts of LC that made me physically, literally cringe. It’s that bad.
I want to remind you that you have no direct information about “what went down.” It appears to be based entirely on secondhand accounts from people with axes to grind, with no quotes about what Quinn actually said. Do you really feel you have solid enough information to condemn Quinn as strongly as you have?
I don’t get that as a “So you shouldn’t do it” criticism. If a certain number of readers come away from A Modest Proposal thinking that eating poor Irish children is a great idea, does that mean Swift shouldn’t have written it? I guarantee you that a healthy number of people came away from Spec Ops thinking nothing more than “Haha, I just killed a bunch of video game guys” but is that the fault of the game?
Marketing is so far removed from development that there might be a valid criticism about its advertising but that doesn’t make the game itself a bad thing.
OK, maybe I wasn’t exactly clear, or maybe you aren’t super familiar with the game (which is fine, it’s not exactly a must-play title) so allow me to illustrate. This is the opening video of the game : https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=W63UTG0WbTE#t=74 (from there to ~4 minutes in).
The content is : the protagonist expo-speaking up who she is, presenting her family, mentioning her love for the titular lollipops (gee, nothing sexual about *that *as a prop, no sirree :p) then rushing off to school to meet her boyfriend. In her cheerleading outfit, for some reason. Which is perfectly innocent exposition. On paper.
What do we *see *of our protagonist ? We see her semi-naked silhouette doing stretchy yoga, a close-up of her ass and bare midriff (twice), a slow pan up to her breasteses, then the silhouette of her tits in a glamour white light haze (twice), a family photo (she’s obscured on it by her younger sister), finally a zoomed-in upskirt panty shot. What’s missing ? Hmm, how about her face ?
Then there’s a short bit gameplay, new cutscene : a zoom on her eye, a zoom on her lips, quick general pan, zoom on the chainsaw, and more panties and flying skirts from there on. Even as she’s cleaving zombies with a sparkling chainsaw, the focus of the camera is glued on her upper thighs and arse. Still no more than short glimpses of what she might look like.
Soo… “Why no, Kobal, I don’t see anything wrong with this picture, I think you’re reaching with this objectification stuff of yours” ? It doesn’t really matter if it’s meant to be (or rather, if it can be, because Suda51 is kind of a basement dweller in general) taken as deconstruction - and I’m not even sure that particular PoV on the game is really meant to be, or if it’s just my brain trying to find ways to play this game without feeling dirty. It’s still pretty uncomfortable to watch.
Now contrast with other media whose popularity is probably based in no small part on a similar core concept (i.e. sexy thang kicking seven kinds of ass) like *Buffy *or Serenity. Can you remember *one *close-up on Buffy’s or River Tam’s ass, or luscious slow pans up their curves to while away the time while they’re talking ? And remember : Buffy, too, was a cheerleader. The series, too, was deconstructing the life of the American teenager (with demons).
But she was never objectified. Juliet Starling is from the get go.
Are you not familiar with one of the first images used to promote Buffy? It was this one
And on Firefly, our introduction to River is as a naked girl in a box. Like so
I definitely won’t argue that Lollipop Chainsaw is a good representation of women in video games, but everything about it beyond Juliet’s sexy presentation is super innocent. She is portrayed as a genius as well as a head cheerleader and is described by everyone as being very nice. And the men in her life all defer to her when it comes to decision making. Oh, and cheerleaders do go to school in their uniforms.