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.
Large breast are a issue for archers. The myth about the Amazons is that they would mutilate their own body for practical purposes, so they would be better archers.
I’ve mostly only learned about EGM/CGM/… culture after Ziff-Davies went away, but I was following the last writers for a while since they were doing interesting, well written stuff (Retronauts, for one). I have a really hard time believing it wasn’t all sarcasm and satire from all the stories I heard on Podcasts.
On your third attempt you still failed to make a link to armor.
I failed to make a good post about bikini armour.
You guys are giving me an idea for a new story - it’s a mashup of Red Sonja and Beach Blanket Bingo. Sonja follows a Lovecraftian horror through a time warp to 50s era Los Angeles and has to infiltrate the beach party scene to identify the horror, who can appear as anyone, to strike it down before it can open a portal to hell and devour all sanity. Needless to say, wackiness ensues.
The Rome Total War 2 story has now hit the games press.
In a nutshell, a bunch of babies review bombed TW2 because of female generals existing in the game. Someone had the audacity to get women for 5 out of 8 generals (.04% chance) and went ballistic. Hundreds of boys - I refuse to call them men - on Steam decided to review bomb the game because the female community manager told them if they did not like it to either mod it out or do not play. The community went nuts.
Unfortunately, this is one of those times that being a woman was entirely the issue. Female generals, heavens forbid! Then the audacity of having the female community manager to delver the corporate message (and was professional about doing so) - oh my! I believe this would not have happened to the same extent if the community manager was male.
I have a strong desire to take these boy-babies out and beat the piss out of them. There are many gender issues on all sides but this should not be one of them and I feel badly for the community manager who has to put up with this shit. These types of misogynist idiots are part of the gender problem and unfortunately some of them will grow up to breed.
For once I am agreeing with all you guys.