That was Mike Pearl. You might be starting to pick up a pattern.
That was Devin Wilson.
That was Joseph Bernstein.
Casey Johnston doesn’t directly reference the other articles. But her point is clear in the opening sentence:
Did you notice that wasn’t a blanket attack on all gamers? It was specific commentary on a specific type of gamer.
So the bulk of the articles you cited are really commentary based on the articles written by Dan Golding and Leigh Alexander. And if you read the two articles (you have read them, haven’t you?) they aren’t making the exact same point.
Your cites actually show your assertions are false. Collusion was not required for these articles to have been written. So the burden of proof falls back to you. If you actually read the articles you cited, you would see that they were all in some way inspired by the Golding or the Alexander article, or both. And that the Golding and the Alexander articles are sufficiently different that no collusion would have been required for either to get written.
As for your other points: reading this thread will show you that you are wrong. But in case that is too hard, here is a link to another forum with appropriate cites:
Now back to my questions, and now I’ve read your cites more closely, I can ask you a more specific question.
Golding’s article is harsher in tone than Leigh Alexanders. Yet Alexander has been subject to vitriolic attacks, and I’ve never heard of Golding before. So why are they treated so differently?
Are you ready to admit that everything you have said is objectively wrong?
I don’t disagree that trying to erase the word “gamer” from gamer culture is stupid. But why do you think feminists are the ones leading the charge? Sarkeesian and Quinn have power because trollish assholes react badly to what they say. DNFTT works both ways and if they honestly believe that they’re wrong, just ignoring them will make them go away. But the death threats and the rape threats prove they’re right. Some “gamers” need to be put down like the rabid animals they are.
One is that Leigh Anderson and other critics of Gamer culture don’t literally have a problem with the word “gamer.” They have a problem with the subculture with which it has become associated. They don’t care whether the word “gamer” continues in usage.
One of their points is that the gamer identity has become entangled with something vile that people who play video games need to disassociate themselves from. Using the word “gamer” as a point of that criticism is rhetorical.
Another point is that the gaming industry seems to have come to the conclusion that they owe something to the “gamer” culture—not “gamer” as in “someone who plays video games,” but the meaning of gamer that has become associated with this problematic culture. The industry doesn’t owe this subculture any obeisance, particularly since the potential market for video games has exploded far beyond this demographic.
Additionally, words do change. It’s possible for the word “gamer” to become tainted in a way that a “person who plays video games” might have to think twice about associating himself or herself with. Whether or not it happens when this situation shakes out, this happens as a matter of course and is not a reason for people who are thinking clearly to get worked up about.
These dicussions are exhausting, because I am really bad at explainign what I mean. Apologies if I don’t manage to address everything in a coherent way.
For some people, being a gamer is part of their identity. People wrte these articles as if the only people for who that is true are hate-filled basement trolls. That’s not the case. There are many kinds of people who identify as gamers and they are getting smeared by these articles. I think it is dumb and offensive to use ‘gamer’ as a rhetorical talking point to mean something that it doesn’t mean. The points they are making is fine, and I agree with them, but they are expressing themselves so horribly that they are actively pissing people off that they have no need to offend.
Dan Golding wrote about how gamer is a toxic male identity, partly defined by marketing and he talks about that for a bit. At the end of the article there is a footnote about how he didn’t give enough credit to women in games, and sorry for not mentioning them. That seemed really disingenuous to me. There have been female gamers from the beginning and in order to construct his narrative about what gamers are, he had to leave us out. You can’t say that ‘gamer’ is a gendered identity’ when women happily call themselves that. Solution: don’t mention those women. It’s really shady.
It makes feminists look dishonest, self-serving and ignorant when they say things about ‘gamers’ that just aren’t true. People are going to get stuck on that kind of detail. If Leigh Alexander doesn’t care about the word gamer (I actually got the impression that she cares quite a lot) then she needs to stop using it, and make her points a different way.
Yes, gamers should kick out the trolls. It seems to me that the way to do that is to pull more moderates in and isolate the radical element. To that end, it seems like a good idea not to alienate people unnecessarily. I think Kimstu has a different plan which is more about the girl power, where we don’t need those jerks anyway but I don’t really know how that works. If you are talking about something like that as a way of change, then please explain it to me because otherwise we are going to be talking at cross-purposes.
I don’t know much about the gaming industry, but I would think that, like most industries, they want to go where the money is. Maybe they don’t to risk trying out new markets when they have a pretty sure thing going with what they know. I don’t see what that has to do with lying about gamer culture.
If ‘gamer’ somehow comes to mine ‘violent freak’ to the wider community, then that would be a sad thing. But for people supposedly in the community to act like being a gamer is not primarily about gaming is mind-boggling to me. They frame themselves as outsiders. I guess their point is that a lot of non-gamers actually play games. Which is fine, and not a problem but gamers also play games. People playing Candy Crush is one thing, but it is rude to start saying “ha, ha, ha I can’t wait for you maladjusted freaks to disappear from gaming.”
It’s a really weird, as a woman, to be ignored and sidelined by feminists who I would expect to support me. I’ll still support them, because death threats are bad, but it seems one-sided to me.
[QUOTE=Weedy]
We are gamers because we play games. Not because we rape people, or live in basements or wear silly hats. For feminists to try to redefine that one thing we all have in common to suit some talking point is a huge strategic misstep, IMO.
[/QUOTE]
“gamer” might at one point have meant “we who play vidya games”. 10, 15 years ago. Back when we were *weirdoes *for playing video games.
Today, everybody enjoys video games. Gamers are something beyond that simple definition - an identity, a subculture, what have you. It goes beyond simply playing video games. We know who we are. And you do too, so don’t fucking play semantic games you asstarded tool.
Plenty of NEEEERDS (like me) are kind of miffed that the mainstream culture has seamlessly morphed from shitting in out chocolate milk and telling us we were budding serial killers to acknowledging that vidya games are just another pastime without breaking its narrative stride. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, today gamer means exactly nothing. Except, maybe, “that one generation that once were weirdoes for playing vidya games, and is feeling butthurt that the dumb-dumbs are catching up and seriously angry that womyn are trying to get in there too”.
And those people, if they’re going to put forward 1920s anti-suffragette rhetoric for whatever reason and glomming onto even *worse *subcultures, can fuck right orff. Speaking as one of them. I used to be ashamed to be “a gamer” because at one time, it really **did **mean shut-in shy skinny/fat introvert uncool guy who got his lunch money took.
I am ashamed today because of you. So hump a cactus for making me look bad by association.
But that’s the thing : it doesn’t. Every other capitalist venture is gung-ho about tapping new markets. The video game industry almost strictly caters to this image of the undersexed 15-year old, even though the 15 year olds of today all play vidya games - men and women alike, sexed and undersexed. As well, there is of course an ever-growing young-adult & adult market. But the gaming industry sticks to its juvenile guns. Ask yourself : why is that ?
There are some mostly white, young, middle class males, who are also misogynist, and generally angry and vile. They are overwhelmingly also gamers. But they’re not vile and angry because they’re gamers.
I’ve been to PAX. There were people there to dress up as their favorite game characters, meet creators and developers, get the latest gaming news, buy gaming merchandise, meet other gamers, and of course play video games. That’s “gamer culture”. It’s about games. Vile douchebaggery isn’t an aspect of gamer culture, and the only reason it become “entangled” with gamer identity is due to certain commentator’s inability to separate individuals from the group they’re part of. Admittedly, this is a concept everyone seems to have been struggling with since at least the neolithic era.
As for the death threats, well I’m sure there were probably some sent over actual anger over this whole stupid thing. But I also seem to remember death threats sent over some article about puns on Cracked. Seriously. And way back in the nineties there were death threats actually sent over a debate about who should host Mystery Science Theater 3000. Really any time there’s any type of large disagreement on the internet, there will be death threats.
But I don’t think most of the people sending death threats actually care who hosts MST3K, whether puns are funny, or in this case “gamer culture” or feminism. They just like sending death threats. And to further riling up tense situations. They’re the same people who, whenever there’s some “social injustice” (perceived or real), will go out and riot not because they actually care about the injustice, but because they just like looting and burning cars, and take any excuse.
And that’s exactly what is “over.” “Gamer” is no longer a valid identity, because “gamers” aren’t the only group (or even the most economically important one) that buys and plays video games. But they are the group that has a disproportionate attention from the game industry.
They are not getting smeared by these articles. What they’re being told is that their idea of what a “gamer” is is out of date. The identity has been co-opted by something distasteful. They might not like it, but it’s a truth they need to wake up to.
Oh, but the point is that it does mean it. Perhaps not in the mind of the people who are being offended, but in the minds of a lot of people, and it’s time that they were made aware of it. If they continue to identify as “gamers” they must do so with full knowledge of what “gamer” has come to mean.
Yes, but any honest discussion of women in games “from the beginning” must treat it as a footnote, because that’s exactly how the industry and the gamer culture has treated them.
To speak these truths about gamer culture does not require there to be zero women who call themselves “gamers.” The reality is that they are a minority and one that is acknowledged and given respect to by gamer culture only when it is convenient for them to do so.
You misunderstand. She cares about the meaning that “gamer” has taken on now. Whether it continues to mean that is a matter for the course of events to sort out. If at some point “gamer” no longer carries these connotations, then it doesn’t matter if people go back to it.
Right now, the “trolls,” as you put it, are in control of gamer culture. It is theoretically possible for something to happen to “pull more moderates in,” but what Leigh Anderson is saying is that we don’t need to wait. If you don’t like what the gamer identity has become, then it’s up to you to divorce yourself from it. Sitting around hoping that you’re going to pull people in is pointless, because the gamer identity has become irrelevant—we’re all into video games now.
But this isn’t really accurate. The sheer variety of games out there caters to EVERYBODY. Look at the ESA annual surveys, the majority of games produced are Everyone-rated titles that don’t fall into the EXPLOSIONS-MUSCLES-TITS trap.
But yes, the majority of big-budget games cater to teenage boys, but that’s because they buy the majority of games. They may not have the superiority of numbers, but they spend the most dollars.
I’m female and I play games. I have a ds and a wii, have had other systems, go play on friends’ systems, borrow games. I play game apps. I go to Pogo and play Scrabble. I play games on my hard drive. I remember playing Pac Man in bars in the early 80s as a small child (my parents kind of sucked).
I don’t consider myself a gamer, however, because it’s just a hobby, not an identity. The people being ridiculous in this whole mess have GAMER as an identity and you either are one or you’re not, and they get to decide who counts. You have to play certain games on certain platforms. My female family members probably spend more time playing Candy Crush than most of the “real” gamers play their games, but somehow that doesn’t count.
I’m a staunch feminist, but it’s also not my identity. It’s something I strongly believe in, equal to how much I think it’s pathetic and gross to wish death threats on people.
To me, this is all about people getting too invested in an identity and not being able to listen to any criticism without flying off the handle. There is no being rational. I agree that there probably is some terrible shit going on with gaming journalism, but I also think that happens in all entertainment reporting. So why is the WOMAN in this bullshit scenario being the one threatened? If it’s about reviews, why is Sarkeesian’s series the work of the devil? It’s a cultural critique, not a review. Attacking her because someone else was FALSELY accused of sex-for-reviews seems to be another issue altogether. It’s FINE to dislike her critiques, but it is NOT OK to send death threats because of some mixed up sense of indignation.
She’s not calling for games to be censored or recalled. Zoe didn’t fuck for ratings. So why is this still a thing? It’s because people who have no critical reasoning/reading/listening skills are being told by a bunch of other idiots that their identity is at stake.
Please, do take legal, fair action against people who screw with reviews. Don’t pretend that this is needed in THIS case and just drop the name gamergate for your cause, shun those who act like 14-year old unsupervised boys. My feminist buddies and I are not coming for your games. We don’t hate gamers. We hate gender slurs and threats of violence and people flipping out at the wrong people over LITERALLY NOTHING.
That seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. “We should make games targeted at teenage boys, because they spend the most money, because we make games specifically targeted at them, because they spend the most money, etc.”
But it gets sticky with a lot of the big-budget games that are appealing to teenage boys but not catered to them. Look at a game that’s coming out in a few weeks, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
Explosions - check.
Muscles - check.
Tits - Not so much.
It is a game that teenagers like, but adults play it too. You see it a lot in the big-budget space. Halo, Borderlands, Battlefield, Assassin’s Creed… yes with the shooty-shooty, not so much with the sexy-sexy or the juvenile jokes. But yes, games like God of War (with its ridiculous amounts of nudity and sex) or Lollipop Chainsaw (which is on the surface one long perv-glance at a cheerleader) certainly exist.
As I said, games are more diverse than they get credit for.
Eh. There’s other types of gender issues in games. I’m surprised you use Assassin’s Creed there, given the minor furore over representation in the latest offering. And, to quibble, Halo has two major female characters, one of whom is naked (ish) all the time, and the idea that Borderlands doesn’t have juvenile jokes (it has plenty!) and sexy-sexy pandering (Moxxi?) is… not really right.
Battlefield and the inevitable CoD series next piece I’ll give you in terms of the games themselves. On the other hand, if someone asked me which games I would think women would get the most unpleasantness from when playing online, I’d pick WoW and those two. People buy those series for the multiplayer, essentially, and that’s an area where I can very much see myself not being interested in were I a woman if I could be assured of the cherished welcoming voices of fellow gamers.
I don’t think that’s the point of Moxxi (at least in her current incarnation after Burch took over). The point is more of a body-positive “a woman is still allowed to be sexy as long as she’s doing it for herself” thing. I’m not sure it’s super well executed (her intro in the Pre-Sequel is “more than just a pretty… everything”), but Burch definitely tries really hard to minimize pandering and maximize equality and such in his writing.
The point of Moxxi, the reason she’s there as a character in the first place, is so she can be marketed as ogleable in-game, and I suppose in order to signal “hey, this is a game with hot chicks with big tits on display, put down your money, teenage boys!”
I can respect writing her with a little nuance (or, hey, some nuance. Or character.) but let’s not kid ourselves about why she was created or why she continues to exist. Character writing is the after-the-fact justification; she’s a sex object who they’ve moved to try and flesh out a bit, not an interesting and deep character who just so happens to be a buxom woman who prefers to wear not very much.
I agree that’s why she was created in BL1, but bless his heart I think Burch is trying his damndest to salvage her in her continued usage in 2 and the Pre-Sequel.
Salvage in this instance is a tricky one. Giving her actual character and purpose and so on is good for making an actual person out of her*, but that doesn’t negate her primary teenage-boy-bait purpose in any way.
Haven’t actually played the Pre-Sequel, so I went on Youtube to see what I could see. Spoilers, natch.[spoiler] It looks like at one point you get to see her in a more “normal”, casual outfit, which is played as this big change from her usual getup… except she still* has a deep-cut shirt to show off her boobs, the sexy walk, etc. Granted five minutes on Youtube isn’t a completely fair analysis, but it doesn’t fill me with confidence that even when deliberately poking fun at what people think is what she’s actually like she still has to be randomly and counter-productively sexy.[/spoiler]