1730

It’s absolutely misogynist because they are claims that men do not receive for doing the exact same things. It really doesn’t get more clear than that. There don’t have to be direct gendered insults levied at her for the underlying source of HRose’s anger to be rooted in misogyny.

Zoe and Anita among others are being unfairly targeted while the vast majority of men in the industry who do exactly what they do if not far worse go by unscathed, ignoring whether the claims are legitimate in the first place (they’re mostly not)

1731

RPS makes a post

With comments turned off, of course.

1732

God DAMN you are quick, TT! I just read that article and was going to post it, but MAN! :-D

Anyways - I like the article, but thats probably not a surprise, since I tend to like RPS (Except for John - He thought Might & Magic RPG’s were games no-one liked - He deserves to get his marshmallows stolen for that one!)

1733

You lost time reading the article before posting, that was your mistake :P

But seriously, it was pure chance, it isn’t like I refresh RPS page every few minutes. I just enter a pair of times a day. This time, it happened to be just when they posted a new article.

1734

Interesting Article. I also like it, of course, and I love they took some time off before posting it so that things were calmer.

But it’s a little bit on the too-lengthy side, though. I doubt many people who doesn’t agree with them already will read it through…

1735

It is long but the bigger issues are 1) the people who disagree with RPS don’t want to read RPS and 2) #Gamergate (or whatever it’s called now) is a huge assortment of people whose only unifying factor is that they reject this new ‘gamer’ definition and felt insulted by the GAMERZ-R-OVA articles, this will lead to many who read it feeling their being called 4chan bigot or whatever. I’m just glad it’s not calling everyone who disagrees with them white, angry teenagers.

Funny side story: Polygon’s Chris Grant combined and published his twitter block list with Chris Plante and Ben Kuchera. 4 days later he’s undone everything as it turns out blocking everyone Kuchera’s ever huffily disagreed with leads to some awkward and indiscriminate blacklisting.

(The Block Bot has a similar problem in that it’s advertised as a way to remove spam and abuse but is also used to block anyone who disagrees with it’s administrators’ rather narrow view of social justice.)

1736

Definitely the best thing RPS has written in years. It’s a long post because it has to be long.

1737

I agree.

I especially enjoyed this citation:

We’re a business, and our business is eyes on pages. We, at RPS, are terrible at this, because we dedicate a vast proportion of our site to providing detailed coverage of niche indie games that will only be of interest to at most a few thousand people. RPS is a colossally stupid failure at clickbait, sacrificing such lucrative “You Won’t Believe What Call Of Duty Did To This Child’s Face!” headlines for “Here Is A Game About A Happy Lion, Gosh It’s Obscure”. To accuse us of a systematic cynical click harvesting because we very, very occasionally write from our hearts about a subject that matters to us a great deal is plainly wrong.

-Todd

1738

These were my personal favorites:

Well, you still won’t engage the other side of the debate. Why isn’t that represented on RPS?

Because we are this side. Our own side. The chaotic nature of this debate, and the way it has been pursued, make things very difficult for us, but we’re doing our best to address some of it in this article. We already believe that we behave ethically, and don’t yet see anything that requires changing. If the current line up of issues could be separated from the abuse – as it clearly can and should be – then perhaps there would be something more concrete and useful to go on. Until that time, we can only present our editorial policy, and our philosophy towards writing about games, in response to the questions we have been asked.

This is horrible, why can’t we keep the politics out of games? Why can’t we just talk about the games?

This is one of those deeply tricky philosophy type things: not talking about politics is actually taking a political stance on them. It doesn’t keep the politics out. Tricky, right? It seems like a trick. But it’s really not: just talking about the games, without questioning anything, is you taking a political stance on games because it amounts saying that you completely accept the games at face value. Your stance on their politics is: this is fine. You can’t just talk about the games, because they can’t be pulled apart from the ideas and circumstances that brought them into being. You can ignore problems, or just not see them, and that’s okay. But if you talk about games, you talk about politics.
(and a few more paragraphs for each of those)

1739

Judging by the comments they get, this is not necessarily the case. Sort of like the CoD boycott…

1740

This is as good a rallying cry as any I’ve heard in this context. If I was the kind of person to do hashtags or tumblrs or whatever, I’d say there should be a concerted effort of “hetero-males for Social Justice”.

I think a lot of the people who view themselves as the “beleaguered hetero-cis-white-male” (those that aren’t being disingenuous, or trolling) crowd feel that they’re being displaced along those lines, and their rhetoric reflects that. I feel like a better effort could be made to emphasize that, yes, you can be pro-boobs and pro blood white also being pro-diversity and anti-misogyny.

1741

The Matt Lees quote is the most important part. If you read between the lines, it explains how futile it is to pipe up with “light criticism” in the middle of a culture war crossfire. Lees (as well as others, I’m sure) sees that as siding with the misogynists. Although that’s often false, it’s difficult to tell when bullets are flying. You have to wait until later.

The benefit of being silent is that it’s easier to identify the actual bigots. It leaves them in stark contrast. People don’t like to be the only ones speaking in a mob. It’s awkward.

That’s why I chafe when RPS asserts that not talking about politics is actually taking a political stance. Because some people do more harm than good by talking. Their ineffective communication makes it more difficult to resolve a problem. That doesn’t change the righteousness of their cause, but it does hold it back. When someone at RPS decides to editorialize out of the blue with an emotional article full of too many adverbs, it’s going to surprise people who weren’t expecting it.

There are more effective ways to communicate. This article was a decent start. (Not that I have the answers; I prefer a more collaborative personal approach that might not work in a broadcast medium like a news site.)

1742

I think one of the key factors is how the word inclusivity. It’s almost a marketing problem, because the words has one meaning but in the way it’s used it can be viewed in a different light. More exactly, when some journalists has used it when calling for more inclusivity in the industry, in games etc, the way the term is used in their editorial seem to be saying you have to include women and social and political issues in substitution or excluding other devs, games, trends, themes, whatever of the “opposite side”, whatever that is.
They use the word as a throwing knife, an order (be more inclusive, goddamnit!), an insult (you don’t agree with me at 100%? You are a bigot!). Very poor PR, and it turns people against them. As we have seen in all this month.

But that’s not really what inclusivity means. A smarter more PR-friendly way of using “inclusivity” would be focusing in the literal meaning: ALL IN. Gaming is big, is huge, is infinite. It has space to include everything and the kitchen sink. More women working as developers, more men, more genres, more sexualities, more game journalists of every ideology. AAA games, indie games, mobile games, social games, emotional games, and all in the middle.
Do you want a AAA violent FPS? Don’t worry, you will have it.
Do you want a quirky indie puzzle game? Oh, have two dozens.
Do you want to make a game about women in Africa? Go ahead. I can’t say for sure it will be a commercial success, but you have your chance: we are in a free capitalist market. Steam is basically open, as KS, and tools like Unity and UE can be used for everyone.
Do you want a titillating game full of boobs? Ok, no problem by me. Do you want a romantic game made by women for women? Again ok, surely I won’t buy it, but I don’t have a problem with it (though surely I also won’t buy the boob game). Do we have to support more strongly to one of the two types the industry? No, imo the authors can make whatever they want, as consumers also will buy whatever they want. Freedom.
But that freedom is a double edged sword: I also think people should have freedom to hire some tacky sexy ladies for their E3 booths. I see as a waste of money but hey, it’s their problem. But we have to include people who likes them.

1743

I’m glad RPS put this together. I think the tone was still a bit more condescending that it should have been, but the sentiments (aside from tone) were right on. Of course, I’m not sure if we’re at enough of a remove yet where anyone will see this as middle ground(ish), but we’ll see…

1744

Well, this is quite tricky. “Not talking about politics is actually taking a political stance on them” opens you up to all kinds of criticisms. Why are you even talking about games when kids are shitting themselves to death in refugee camps? Surely your failure to use your platform to discuss global poverty and epidemic disease is a political stance on those issues. This was Catherine Mackinnon’s argument years ago and there aren’t any satisfactory answers to it. Certainly I don’t think it provides a stable pulpit for preaching and sanctimoniousness.

1745

Excatly. I don’t want to take anything away from anyone else and vice-versa. Within those boundaries, it’s a free-for-all with no guarantees of funding or success, but the barriers to entry have never been lower. Do your thing, throw it out there, and see how it goes.

1746

Sorry guys, it’s not quite that simple. Let me try to explain.

I’m going to be an optimist and say that most people don’t want to restrict those things. However, they do want to point out how it makes other people feel, especially when it’s the default and shows up more than you’d expect. I look at it more as a style guide than a laundry list of allowed and taboo features.

The reason this firestorm is so silly is because it will probably be transparent to those of us who consume videogames. For example, it doesn’t harm me if developers become more careful not to treat female characters as objects. But it makes a big difference for females who play videogames. It’s merely something game developers may have never thought about until now.

Once the medium matures to the level of, say, books and movies, things will settle down in the social media sphere. There will still be debates at the margin, but it won’t reach the level of an existential crisis. The first step is getting to that maturity point.

1747

But books and movies are full of sexual objectivism, clichéd tropes about sexes, etc. There are thousands of books are specially full of garbage, from every type. Summer blockbuster movies have hot chicks put there for heterosexual men, flimsy characters that are put there just to be the romantic interest of the main character, etc.

These mediums are just more respected because they are all inclusive, from low art to high art, and between all the garbage there is also stuff that respects women.

Once the medium matures… once the medium matures there will be still people using sex and power fantasy to sell games. It’s less devs may have never thought it until now (the female pov), and more they thought it already (the male pov).

1748

Ayn Rand joke goes here.

These mediums are just more respected because they are all inclusive…

I think it’s because they’ve already been through this process and emerged as mature media. Not that they went through anything exactly like games are going through. It’s a little different because games seem to be starting behind the curve because of who makes and consumes them, and they’re expected to change very rapidly in today’s social media space.

I just think you’re looking at the results and not the necessary process. We’re in the middle of it.

1749

That’s true, and that’s ok. Good even. There are books and movies I find absolutely deplorable, ones that rely on schlock and sex appeal. There are movies and books that objectify both women and men (though in different ways, see: comedy, romantic). You know what? They each have their place.

What I want is the medium to mature so that the baser elements of male power fantasy aren’t all that exists. Right now it isn’t, things have gotten appreciably better in recent years. It used to be true that the male power fantasy was almost all there was. Now it still makes up the vast majority, but games like Journey, Gone Home, Proteus, etc. have diversified the range of experience available.

I don’t actually want these tropes to cease to exist. I merely want them to cease being the default, to cease being omnipresent.