1850

Yeah…it really is amazing how many arseholes there are in the world (seriously). That’s one good thing the interweb has opened my eyes too.

1851

I can’t believe it took the internet to do that, try working in retail for 20 years, assholes are everywhere and always have been.

1852

MRAs have earned my ire on numerous occasions, this time I’m yelling at the idiots poking the hornets nest.

1853

I am surprised but stand corrected.

1854

You don’t think that is how most of the people outside the gaming world see gamers anyway? Geez, numerous shows have satirized gamers in that fashion for 20 years. And it’s not a “filthy room”, it is a dark filthy basement of a room.

1855

I get that there may be some articles on mainstream sites (or the half-arsed blog sections of those sites) but how many people are going to actually be affected by these articles? Unless you’re really invested in social justice or gaming and you’ve somehow avoided this story up till this point, surely you’re not going to care about a confused, hard to follow drama in a community you’re not part of. There’s hardly a lack of stories that actually make sense.

As that video LMN8R kept posting said: “who’s Phil Fish?”.

1856

I am going to venture a guess based on the people I know who game that very few of them could even tell you who Sarkeesian is, or that she has done anything involving their world of gaming. They would have no knowledge of any of this current little shitstorm. This is something for the “deeply” imbedded gamer. The gamer who feels the need to read the reviews or magazines, who is involved in the industry or who has friends who somehow get him/her excited. For others this may involve reading a small article in their local newspaper (assuming they read it).

1857

That’s pretty interesting. I hope some day in a postmortem your team can clarify what were the changes, how the game was before watching the video.

1858

Yes, there was also this:

1859

I’m not worried about the “gamer” image being further tainted by this recent controversy. It has a long history of being tainted. I hardly ever self-identify as a gamer in public, professional, or social settings. If the topic comes up naturally I might hint at my interest. I am perfectly fine with that too. Gaming is somewhat of a personal experience for me and I privately value it, but I have never felt the need to mix a gamer identity into how I project myself to others.

Two years ago during a professional lunch interview with a candidate and 6 colleagues the informal conversation drifted onto gaming. Every single person in the room offered some negative perception about gaming and that was long before this controversy. So don’t worry, the Twitter hashtags and Tumblr blog posts haven’t really changed much.

-Todd

1860

Would you mind if I sent a link to your posting to Anita Sarkeesian? I think this, more than anything else, is what she might most appreciate right now. Lord knows I certainly do – this is the best sort of outcome from this entire terrible situation.

1861

Someone watch this and figure out what it means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJyU7RSvs_s&app=desktop

Seems like a lot of unpleasant, damaged, people, but it’s too dull to dissect more lucidly.

1862

Something about a communist conspiracy to make everyone feminist? The general idea seems to be that feminists in academia are teaching people about feminist issues, which is “infesting” game journalism. Somehow this is a ruining gaming.

Basically nonsense. Sure, sometimes people take the idea of social justice a bit too far, but teaching people to be aware of how their actions affect other people isn’t a bad thing.

Edit: I looked at another of his videos but he lost me when he started defending, “Bash a Violent Bitch Month.”

1863

I really couldn’t take it past the half way point - not because the people involved, but the author of that youtube reading every damn line, so i started reading rather than listening past that.

He (the youtube author) seems bothered by the smooth frictionless manifestation of “groupthink”, so i’m thinking he wouldn’t fit in very well over at the Other Forum, but it is a great, fantastic, example of how two different sides of the political divide perceive each other. This guy is deeply disturbed by there use of jargon and extrapolates from their shared language and academic interests some kind of broad conspiracy, when really from their point of view their simply discussing in a “safe space” the forms of engagement that want to see - in a very highbrow, academic way, not in a boots-on-the-ground, practical way - the terms of engagement with what for them is social activism with an end goal of influencing the real world.

In other words, as feminists and progressive academics, the academic language of social engagement they use is deeply disturbing to this guy. That he sees the rather rare group of feminist game academics all together at a feminist game academic conference as evidence of a conspiracy is laughable. What he could have pointed out but was too dense to do so was that it does reflect shared views and ideologies. Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t need to have some grand conspiracy of academics communicating with her about what to do; she’s already a feminist game critic, so her behaviors and opinions about how and when to engage industry are going to be very much like theirs anyway.

1864

You do know that Adam Biessener (former GameInformer reviewer) is now our Brand Manager right? And he’s the public face of the company. Our PR manager, Stephanie Schopp, is about as liberal as they come. And internally, we have plenty of people who are self-described SJWs.

We don’t discriminate when we hire (and I don’t want to imply that most SJWs do either). I can disagree with someone without wanting them to “suffer a consequence” for their belief.

1865

Heh. Goddam commie. ;-D

1866

Shawn Elliott (Arkane, former CGW & Irrational) talks about his dealings with TotalBiscuit/The Cynical Brit.

1867

This is the dumbest thing in this thread.

1868

I must have missed the part where people were threatening to rape him, hunt him down, and kill him for months. I mean you know the usual stuff women get when they say something “wrong”. And yes, minor. It wasn’t even huge news. Sure maybe the tech sites ran with it, but compare it with some other cases … Sterling for example. It’s minor in comparison to other scandals. But you completely ignored my other point; he’s not alone in these believes or the donations and certainly not the only guy in charge of a notable company with those beliefs. So what makes this different… not just the target but the complete lack of support from his company. He didn’t even try to overcome the problem.

But no I don’t equate controversial choices as on the same level as being targeted for your sex or your race. The people questioning Anita for her views are free to do so. The large mass targeting her because she is a woman and they don’t think she has a right to those views because she is a woman, they’re not redeemable.

1869

Contacting a developers HR department over a Twitter disagreement is pretty lame.