1830

Really? Sure, there may be some confirmation bias in an individual’s perception of the volume of articles relating to the subject in recent times - after all they have tended to garner a lot of attention and commentary. But then implying that perception means the individual must take personal affront to it is idiotic and insulting. You seem to be keen on doing a lot of labeling in this thread.

[QUOTE]We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=197390707[/QUOTE]

Meh. Original study is not even linked. Without that backing it is nothing more than throwaway statistic garbage for a Hollywood interview.

1831

Well, damn.

I, uh, mean that someone else obviously posted that, and I never said any such thing. Yeah, that’s it.

I still stand by the numerical scores being nearly worthless though, but for completely unrelated reasons ;)

1832

Yeah. The thing is it’s quite hard to articulate what the problem is. I’ll take another stab at it:-

It’s like, on the one hand, you have a model where people, individuals, have thoughts, some of which are stupid (or at the limit, actually harming others, when, on the ““Fire!” in a crowded theatre” model, they’re articulated); on the other hand, you have a model where people have thoughts as symptoms of a kind of social/memetic disease.

So while it looks like SJWs are simply calling out idiots (and that’s a kind of defence they can whip out at need, usually with a “tu quoque” jab), really the effect of it is more like they’re trying to eradicate a social disease by eliminating its bearers (not physically, but from the stream of discourse, as it were).

Which is kind of ok. I mean, there’s a sense in which, as a metaphor, you can say that sexism, racism, etc., are a bit like social diseases, they are memetic diseases, and bearers of those memes should be silenced so the disease doesn’t spread.

But the problem with it is twofold:-

  1. Unconsciously, it can be taken as more than a metaphor, and it can lend itself to the natural human drive to divide us/them - it can sustain an unhealthy hatred, and that hatred can be amplified as groupthink and conformity. In this sense, it can become just a replacement for things like religious, sexist, racist bigotry, etc. IOW, in a trope, “I can’t hate niggers any more, but man I need to hate something, so ima hate Christians instead.” Something in that area - or maybe, one could say, it’s like there has to be some set quantum of bigotry in society, and if it doesn’t find an outlet in one kind of us/them division, it’ll find it in another. And the way it’s “dressed up” doesn’t actually matter.

  2. It (this view of thoughts as symptoms of a social or memetic syndrome) doesn’t leave any room for human beings making mistakes. Have a bad thought, and you are “marked”, it’s not like you can have a bad thought and it be something you yourself can reflect on and think “man, that was dumb, yeah, I see that now”. In a sense, the SJW feel is unforgiving.

Speaking for myself, I know that I have a zillion stupid, mad, bad, crazy thoughts per day. In an unguarded moment, I might express one of them. But ought I to be defined by that expression? Or ought we not rather to understand that the nature of thought is to “try on” lots of possibilities, and it’s the selective, critical faculty that creates a coherent worldview out of that churning mess of possibilities? Ought a person to be defined by the content of a “time-slice” of their thoughts, or the overall effort they make to bring their thoughts to the tribunal of reason?

1833

I’m really losing touch with all this, SJW? (Stanford Jazz Workshop?).

I suspect it really all just boils down to some very juvenile and insecure young boys and men, that probably don’t have a great record with girls in their lives, getting all trigger happy (because the games they play do)? Am i right?

1834

This particular avenue of argument drives me nuts.

You know what Brandon Eich’s other option was? To give everyone the finger and stay on as CEO. He wasn’t being investigated by Muslim plants in the Federal prosecutor’s office, he didn’t have activist Carter-appointed judges signing warrants willy-nilly to search his email for gay slurs. He supported a cause that many regular people find obnoxious – how codifying bigotry in state constitutions could be classified as anything else is beyond me – and people voiced their objections.

If he has the backing of the board, this all blows over and nobody cares. If he’s an effective leader who is otherwise good for the company, I suspect that even most liberal-leaning non-profit boards would stand by him for the relatively minor infraction of a distasteful political contribution years ago.

He didn’t. He stepped down. The only reason anyone even gives a shit about it is because Fox needed something to be indignant about that week, and identity politics are a hell of a drug.

The entire argument that “liberals want to be the thought police and regulate expression” is absurd on its face. The idea that someone disagreeing with you is trying to violate your First Amendment rights by saying that you’re wrong is ludicrous, and needs to go away.

Oh shit, I’m censoring you now by saying that I find your ideas lacking and have no wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Better call up the militia to make sure nobody steps on your rights!

1835

Oh the irony :)

1836

LMN8R, I’m well aware that the plural of anecdote isn’t data. :) I actually don’t really take offense at these discussions – for the most part, the discussions have seemed juvenile in the same way that politics discussions in college were, particularly after a few beers or a few rounds of the bong (and the overheated responses to the gaming press’ articles about misogyny are way, WAY over the line – no dispute about that). Everyone take a deep breath and keep things civil, rather than resorting to insults.

I think the larger issue is that “raising awareness” of an issue doesn’t actually effectuate change. At the risk of overestimating game developers, I doubt there’s a single active developer who isn’t aware that some quarters are looking to criticize virtually any game for being offensive. I’m not sure how much of a chilling effect that has on game development (if any), or whether if encourages developers to make more inclusive games. There’s just not data (again, recognizing that data is different than anecdotes) on that supporting either side. I suspect most developers (particularly AAA developers) look at this from the perspective of how to maximize the amount of money a game will make, regardless of whether it’s going to make money or not.

The larger issue of dealing with all the various forms of discrimination that exist in our society (whether it’s sexism, racism, etc.) is something we all need to grapple with. Even as a “privileged white male” (in the current politically correct parlance), it’s blindingly obvious that we have serious issues to deal with around discrimination in contemporary society. Rather than posting fairly transparent and shallow critiques or articles about bias in games (or insulting “gamers”), however, I wish people would actually get out there and do something about it.* If you’re concerned about bias in games, develop games that aren’t biased (or, if you’re not a developer, financially support the development of games you want to play either through avenues like kickstarter, pre-orders, or even letters to developers/publishers).

  • My own way of doing something about it, incidentally, is mentoring kids in my local school district and through our house of worship and teaching them about technology, particularly the hardware and systems maintenance side of things, since that’s what I know. In that mentoring, I tend to try to bring in more girls than boys, precisely because there are fewer women than men in technology – and because, as a father, I recognize the biases my daughters are going to face and want to do what I can to minimize those biases.
1837

And in this case the match was struck by a guy who thought it was cool to air the dirty laundry from his break up in social media. We are talking real mature people.

1838

Someday, we’re all going to look back on this thread and laugh.

1839

While we may never know what happened inside the boardroom at Mozilla, I suspect that his removal had a lot to do with being the public face of Mozilla – a nonprofit which receives a great deal of its funding from progressive individuals and companies. Having someone who was perceived as being homophobic was and would have continued to be a PR and fundraising nightmare for them. I suspect, however, that if he had strong support on the board, Mozilla would have kept him on and waged the PR battle. They didn’t, which likely means that either he didn’t have the support on the board or he just decided it wasn’t worth it and gave the board the easy out (or both).

I think you’re drawing a strained parallel with the religious right. For example, to take the most obvious hot button issue, the religious right isn’t attacking people for having abortions – they’re trying to remove the right of folks to have abortions. I think that’s entirely different than saying “you can say and believe what you want, but you may be held to account for what you say and believe by activists and market forces.”

The SJW position is (I think?) about social activism and bringing pressure to bear, in most cases, rather than restricting the rights of others. Are you saying people shouldn’t vote with their pocketbooks and support causes/products/developers that they believe are worth supporting (or, conversely, boycott products/stores/developers/etc. that they believe are problematic)?

1840

At my studio, the Sarkeesian videos have really shaken things up, and made us incredibly lucid as to how offensive game scripts and content could be. A lot of the developers here simply weren’t aware of how ingrained and potentially offensive the tropes were. This resulted in us actually re-writing the script for our current game to soften these aspects.

I know of about 4-5 other projects in the industry where the exact same thing has happened from talking to people working on them.

These videos have been incredibly effective.

The main problem was, most developers were simply unaware of the problem… creating offensive content simply because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Now, before you status-quo people start howling that the games you love are being ripped apart and ruined… I doubt you’ll even notice the changes we’ve done. Unless you’re obsessed with having prostitutes everywhere in every game you play.

1841

Your beliefs can make you unsuited for work at a particular company. Would you hire a strident SJW at Stardock?

Those beliefs made me more of a liability to Mozilla than he was an asset. If it was just SJW’s complaining, it wouldn’t have mattered- but this went beyond SJW and into Mozilla’s backers.

1842

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

1843

Nobody thinks Eich is a criminal, or even dangerous. His beliefs simply make him unpleasant, at least to some people. Mozilla is private organization, and like most such organizations it can select who is in the club and who is out.

Eich remains perfectly free to start his own software company and fill it with like-minded people. Or maybe Hobby Lobby is hiring.

1844

=D

345

1845

The SJW and some very influential members gaming media community have released a meme into the world, that gamers are misogynerd virgin neckbeard losers living at home in a filthy room in their parents house with their anime dolls and lack of social skills and their horribly beta aspie ways.

Now the mainstream press* are running with this, “Gamers”, not MRAs, not 100 people out of 22.5m unique visitors to 4chan, not lonewolf psychos, not Quinns twat of an ex-boyfriend, but gamers, are out there harassing women en masse because they hate feminism and women. This is brilliant some people are saying, I knew it all along! Not only are games murder simulators, they are misogynistic rapist trainers too! The lets ban them or lets regulate them and censor them crowd have been handed this on a plate.

I say sod that, I love games and I don’t want to have to hide the fact I love games when I’m at work or on my public profiles or at social events. Part of #gamergate and #notyourshield is about fighting against this, and fighting to remove the cause from the ZQ and AS abuse, despite a slick multi-publication smear campaign by the opposing factions insisting its all about abusing others. Some pride in being a gamer.

*Telegraph, The Guardian, Time Magazine, The New Yorker with a horribly biased op-ed from Jenn Franks/Maya Kramers patreon Simon Parkin

Some more here.

http://gamergate.giz.moe/

Right wing bastards article, one of the few counter opinions from the media

1846

The gaming community doesn’t do itself any favors by losing what passes for its mind every time someone points out that the gaming community has a few issues. 4-chan and Reddit going on kamikaze harassment runs every time Anita Whats-her-name releases a video kind of proves their point. Maladjusted young men and misogyny: it’s not exactly a new phenomenon.

And the mainstream press can smell a controversy a mile away. They’re gonna write about it…which is, after all, their job. If you think yelling “bias” and “smear” is gonna help your cause, well, good luck with that.

1847

hahahaha the media conspiracy.

1848

I theorized upthread that what we’re really seeing is the collapse of various internet filter bubble-communities, and the intersection of the contents of one popped bubble with the other. I think that accounts for a large quantity of the most violent reactions (again, the ones that aren’t specifically trolling or nursing secret grudges, etc). People who are surprised to learn that the way they thought the world looked actually looks quite different. This goes for both sides. I think that the reason that the MRA types are over-reporting games journalism as chock full of feminist bias is because they’re just seeing these issues become visible for the first time, even though they’ve been present in more or less consistent numbers (likely with a slow, gradual increase) for a while. Meanwhile, the so-called SJW types are shocked and dismayed to learn that there are some right assholes out there.

I say this because I feel like I’ve been tracking horrible-ness on the internet for quite a while. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of this misogynist type stuff for quite a while, going back to the early days of the Mystery Method and the PUA community, which has now blossomed into the full-on MRA communities. None of the actions anybody has taken here has shocked me, probably indicating I have no faith in my fellow man and am dead inside.

1849

Unfortunately, I doubt that the public image of “gamers” can really be repaired at this point, given the absolutely disgusting campaign waged by the “undesirables” factions of the 4chan/reddit/etc community over the past month.

The mainstream media has already caught wind and the toothpaste is out of the tube. The general public doesn’t understand that there is an extremely vocal and horrible minority that has been spewing this hateful bile, and unfortunately it seems that no amount of damage control can really help now. Especially seeing how these “undesirables” are pretty much still churning on all cylinders.

It’s pretty misguided to bemoan the mainstream news media for reporting on this. Your anger and concern should really be directed at the vocal minority within those communities who have tainted the “gamer” label in the first place.