Games Journalism 2018: We're taking it back!

Lovely, just lovely.

What else would a kid be good for? They’re so small.

“How else do you expect me to polish the inside of a 45 millimeter shell casing?”

Another week in “bu bu we only care about HISTORY its not like we just hate women” , kidding they just hate women.

Nobody should ever play Total War for authentic anything.

These shrinking violets should go back in history and register their complaints about women generals to Boudicca.

Go on, go do it you gossamer strength manhood, febrile fools. I’d say that if seeing strong women precludes your enjoyment may you never have children, but I dare say that this attitude likely makes this redundant. Go, and be this beacon of failed toxic manhood so others may be steered from this ruinous course.

I really despise these fools.

Agree.

It also reinforces the increasingly accurate slur that core gamers have a large segment of grown men who behave like puerile little boys.

You dont see men who enjoy other popular hobbies like say fishing or gardening behaving like this. Its embarrassing more than anything.

Well… I’m not so sure about that. Some of them, like fishing and hunting, can be pretty damn exclusionary and hostile to women. Maybe not as vocally, or as widespread, but certainly present.

Also they don’t tend to have the type of active community boards you see in gaming, at least not to the same degree. Steam is a big centralized source, but look at some of the stuff on ESPN or major sports websites. You can see the same type of behavior there too.

TLDR - bad actor manipulates game mechanics (e.g. suiciding male generals to only keep the female generals around, mass hiring generals and only showing the female hires, or even might have modded the chances higher) to arrive at contrived example, manages to bait a bad community manager response whose words are then blown up (into the “CA doesn’t want you to play their games” line).

Companies have to get better at not getting baited into these exchanges. It’s not the first time this has happened…

It’s really hard to review bomb a body of water, that’s for sure.

Saw this Twitter thread today and it’s awfully relevant to the above:

(Many more in the thread)

The first one’s clearly a joke. Ellie Gibson has claimed responsibility.

Aren’t they all jokes?

But…but…they are “offensive” jokes!

This one at least seems a funny and insightful satire of what’s done usually in the magazine and ad industries.

Don’t:

Do:

One of those is a Seanbaby article. I’m not sure what qualifies as a “joke” in this context, but… it’s Seanbaby.

Those images triggered massive outrage/eyerolling at ResetEra and all sorts of folks now equate the early 2000s game magazine with soft porn, which is ridiculous since there were plenty of serious mags too. If not for Computer Games Strategy Plus and Computer Gaming World, this very board you’re posting on probably wouldn’t exist. Next Generation, Edge… all excellent and published at that time.

As usual though, the truth is less interesting than creating a fiction of history.

Yeah, calling EGM soft porn is disrespectful to PC Accelerator.

There were articles about why bikini armor was… practical in some of these magazines. It’s not soft porn, but they don’t get a pass because everyone was doing it. It’s perfectly fine to point out that these approaches were not good, and joke or no joke, it didn’t make being a woman in gaming either and it enforced stereotypes. For every person who writer and acknowledges Archie Bunker is what he is, another decides TV is helping him enforce his world view.