steve
3101
The media isn’t able to coerce game developers to do anything; if they held this power, there’d be no buggy games, no copy protection, Mario would be playable on your iPhone, blah blah blah. Seriously, do you let the press coerce you into doing anything?
In most cases, protesting an issue wouldn’t make you a misogynist; what makes you a misogynist is how you go about your protest. Writing articles about why tropes are worth having, or why GTA should have a male protagonist if Rockstar wants to give GTA a male protagonist, blah blah blah wouldn’t make you a misogynist. Repeatedly calling Anita Sarkeesian every possible slur imaginable or focusing exclusively on Zoe Quinn instead of her boyfriend or the press dude she was accused of paying off with sweet hot love might indicate you have more of an issue with women then you do the issues at hand.
If someone wants to argue that there are a contingent of people who don’t like change to their hobby then I can get behind that. It’s the leap to what their motive is. It’s the character assassination that people are objecting to.
Those kinds of character assassinations in reply to reasonable discussions are the minority. If you want to troll Tumblr or random blogs or, god forbid, YouTube comments, sure, you’ll find people throwing out MISOGYNIST like it’s candy. But there’s no large-scale concerted effort on the part of the patriarchy crowd that’s even close to the scale of what people like Sarkeesian and Quinn have faced.
Also, I’ve known plenty of misogynists. They have women friends, they claim to love women, but they don’t view them as equals or treat them with the same respect they treat another person exclusively due to their gender, and the negative traits they associate with it. That’s misogyny. It’s not just the pure hatred you see from some folks on the Twitters and such.
Soma
3102
I think you misunderstood the people who ask for social justice. They don’t want to, say, randomly inject women characters in a game “for balance sake”, or want developers to hire more women just because they are women. People just want women to be judged on merit, not on their gender. It is an issue of meritocracy.
Because meritocracy simply isn’t what’s happening. There are plenty of data showing that women in general are being paid less when they have the same qualifications as men. Applying directly to video games, when a gritty fantasy game has women wearing chain mail bikini, it just breaks immersion. (Can armoured princess stand a little bit more armoured???) It is just gratuitous pandering to the game’s straight male audience at the expense of everything else. It is about keeping internal consistency, about merit. Another example: if a video game is targeted directly at women, they need to hire more women developers rather than having male developers second guessing what women gamers want or don’t want.
PS: This is where the free market is a progressive force: when there is money to be made in games targeted at women like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the most obvious and cost effective way to earn that money is to hire lots and lots of female developers.
Notice how when it comes to people wanting a straight Green Lantern, a male Thor, or a white Heimdahl… well, those people deserve every benefit of the doubt. They have valid opinions and should be respected, and must be called no names.
Now, on the other hand, if you want play as a black dude in Kingdom Come, well, that’s RIDICULOUS. If you want to play as a girl in GTA6, you’re infringing on Rockstar’s very identity. Those SJWs not only have invalid opinions they should keep to themselves, expressing those opinions is essentially two sides of the same coin(a pox on both their houses!) as doxxing and swatting and death threats. Those opinions are, arguably, worse than hate speech, because they are an existential threat to gaming and gamer culture.
RickH
3104
As I noted, there is no way to disagree with you that you would concede has legitimacy.
RickH
3105
Nope. But you do want to tell one of the most successful game developers in the world how to run their ship. Because they are doing it wrong and need the assistance of people who don’t have any financial stake in the matter. Viva the non-stakeholder busybody.
Like the non-stakeholder busybodies who would tell Sony not to have a black James Bond? Or, to make it less hypothetical but keep all the same players, the non-stakeholder busybodies who boycotted Thor because Idris Elba played Heimdahl?
Seriously, Rick, what is the point of this? That principle you just explained, “no criticism by anyone without a financial stake”, is clearly not something anyone believes, and I can tell, because it’s something that showed up for the first time after post 3000 and will absolutely never show up again.
I know you don’t believe that. You know you don’t believe that. Having an opinion is not telling someone “how to run their ship”.
Regardless, you cut out the rest of the post there. What you need is not a principle that explains why Rockstar should be immune to criticism(which you found but obviously don’t believe), you need a principle that explains why it’s OK to be upset about a gay Green Lantern but not OK to be upset over a white Prince of Persia.
And who is doing that beyond people having and expressing opinions about games?
Cultural criticism isn’t telling anyone how to run a ship. It’s just pointing out the inequalities.
That’s fine…as long as those making the criticism that they are not immune to criticism in return. The problem I see is that the usual suspects are once again tarring those that criticize them as misogynists/racists/homophobes.
The reason gg continues unabated is that the old smears lose their sting after awhile.
People who say and do controversial things that get enough attention will attract the crazies. They don’t deserve it but it’s ewually a mistake to apply crude motivations to it. The gg folks are pissed off mostly about what they think is a corrupt gaming media. I think they’re wrong but it’s not driven by misogyny.
The death and rape threats me and my family have received over the years, the packages we’ve received (“elemental materials” box in he mail, har har), etc. has taught me that the Internet has awful people looking for justification to say and do awful things. It surprises me not in he least that people who say and do things that anger others, justified or not, get death threats. But it has nothing to do with gg, liberalism, conservatism, etc.
If people constantly called me racist or sexist after I explained my sincere views, I’d like to imagine I’d devote the tiniest scintilla of thought into wondering if maybe I was doing something to cause that.
No, better to just assume it’s a smear and continue doing whatever you were.
Turns out, being unapologetically un-PC is pretty much only for conservatives saying awful shit about Muslims or Mexicans or feminists, SJWs who start airing their sincere beliefs(including “hey could you possibly let me change the skin color in character creation” and “that is a tacky shirt”) is cause for immediate Defcon 1 at the Breitbart Hugbox, bring Twitchy to full alert, KIA and /baph to standby in case we need to get this guy* fired.
*Well, of course, it’s generally not a guy. Though, also of course, misogyny is a myth. Never forget that it’s about ethics in video game journalism.
Virgil,
…or those who make it a habit to accuse those they don’t agree with of being racist or sexist could pick up the book “the boy who cried wolf”.
There was a wolf at the end of that story
But let’s embrace that analogy. So basically, because you imagine that other people are calling things that aren’t sexist sexist, you what, don’t believe anything could be sexist?
Who is the boy in this analogy? You don’t know me. You’ve never believed me in the past about something being sexist and gotten burned when it turned out to be actually just good clean Christian fun. You’ll never believe me in the future, because as you’ve previous stated, unless someone admits to being a misogynist you don’t believe they should be called that.
So really this is basically about how you reject the common definition of a word and don’t want other people to use it correctly. Out of respect for your feelings.
RickH
3114
(1) Your mind-reading powers are on the fritz. I’ve posted pretty much exactly this sentiment multiple times – and I’ve never taken the side of the busybody offering cheap and easy platitudes trying to tell people who are doing expensive and difficult things how to “improve” their work.
(2) You assume a false premise by claiming it’s “criticism.” It’s not. It’s activism, people trying to impose their vision of the world by telling creators how to create properly. The person demanding to gender-change the protagonist of AC Unity or GTA V isn’t trying to improve unit sales for Ubi or Rockstar for FY 2014, they simply want their sensibilities to have primacy.
RickH
3115
And the wolf fared a lot better than our glib protagonist who liked to shoot his fool mouth off about matters of little substance just to get attention.
Please show this activism in action in a way isn’t just people expressing opinions. Were there boycotts, calls for banning, attempts to get advertising pulled? If there was (and I don’t actually know if there was or not), then that’s activism, if there wasn’t and it was just people saying, nicely or rudely, that they want a female character in GTA, that’s just people expressing their opinion.
I have no reason to believe or disbelieve you. I don’t have any reason to think you have any familiarity in the topic at all.
I have my own opinions on these matters and when it comes to the game industry, game culture, demographics and the way the games media functions today I feel pretty qualified in my familiarity with these issues. I also have a great deal of familiarity on how other game developers across the industry feel on this topic (That is, the tiny percent who even care).
If you want to tell yourself,that people who don’t share your views of things are driven by racism or woman hating, knock yourself out. But It means nothing to me.
Edit: was responding to v. On an iPad, should have used quote function.
That’s another recurring element in this thread, the idea that I’m doing this to get attention. We see it also with pwk’s whining about “clickbait”, it’s not just me, it’s Alexander, it’s the PC Gamer guy, it’s the whole Gawker media empire. It’s a very comforting fable to tell yourself(as an aside, the Boy Who Cried Wolf is like a paragraph long. It’s not “a book”.), that everyone who disagrees with you is just insincerely trolling.
I honestly do believe that people should be allowed to criticize videogames even if they don’t own stock in the company.
ShivaX
3119
Well, there’s your first mistake.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf is about LYING. So the allegation here is that Leigh Alexander secretly doesn’t think Gamers Are Over? That the Polygon knows in his heart that Bayonetta 2 isn’t sexist? That the guy who asked Kingdom Come about a black character was doing that for the lulz?
It’s a children’s fable that is less than a page long. I realize this thread had an anti-college degree circlejerk because of how academia turns our children into gay socialist baristas, but I seriously don’t think it’s asking too much to read a single page.
Some people sincerely do take issue with depictions of race and gender and class and sexuality in media. I honestly don’t even know what solution Rick wants here, I think it has to be for us to shut up about it. I get it, man, first we elected that Kenyan, then the courts let homos marry, plus your kid’s school is teaching that global warming and evolution bullhooey. I get that you’re fed up with the ever encroaching modernity.
But seriously what exactly do you want us to do?
