Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

Fuck.

context on the above tweet: https://storify.com/alexlifschitz/escapist-drama

seriously fucked up

this shit literally makes my blood boil. shame on escapist. i thought that was a decent, thoughtful site.

i'm reminded of all the shit laura hudson had to put up with while running the comics alliance website, for penning and commissioning stories about female and gay and POC writers and artists and comics. 'geek' cultures have a real strong undercurrent of intolerance (which obvs is the thrust of this thread, but...)

This stuff is lolzy right up to the point where people are being harrassed and terrorized which is more or less from jump, so maybe not so funny really.

i don't think any of it's lolzy. its the same old shit.

it's all so ridiculous that it should be laughable, but then I keep remembering that people's lives are being ruined by these horrible, entitled man-babies.

Harassment isn't funny but I feel the only way I have to effectively convey my disdain for ppl who are pro-GamerGate is to laugh at and minimize them.

and that rings true too.

finding a personally right way to claim solidarity in any case where you're not a direct target can be a challenge
renouncing the "gamer" tag seems like a good option when/if you might conceivably be confused with these jackasses

stop buying intel ?

the whole thing is sad to me, but i'm still reluctant to renounce the "gamer" tag, in a way you're letting them win

what am i letting them win?

Why would anyone want to be defined by one of their hobbies

Yeah man I'm a model train enthusiast first and foremost #TrainGate

people define themselves by all sorts of weird things. but you have to question the point of hanging onto a word once it's reached a certain level of toxicity

smellin yr own farts aint gonna do nothin abt gamer gate folks just fyi

Why not define yourself by a hobby? What else is there to life besides things you love? Would you rather be defined by a job or your relation to another person? Or the fact that you have a slight limp and a wonky eye? Why not define yourself by something that you have actively chosen and invested time in?

i define myself as a primate personally, im a primateist, dont try to get me interested in that other stuff

xp

yes! like when people say "it's just a game" like really not worth caring about as much as other monuments of human culture like slavery or war or Chris Nolan movies

Games aren't worth caring about in comparison to wars and slavery, though.

When you get to the point where you are seriously espousing the viewpoint that your ability to partake in a luxury activity is as important as basic human rights issues, it's really time for a dose of perspective (possibly administered by slap).

Why not define yourself by a hobby? What else is there to life besides things you love? Would you rather be defined by a job or your relation to another person? Or the fact that you have a slight limp and a wonky eye? Why not define yourself by something that you have actively chosen and invested time in?

I'd hope it was something I was sincerely passionate about. Video games aren't one of those things for me.

dont define yrself, be chill, be kind, skateboard maybe

it wasn't to say define - it was to say that to be passionate about culture, about the good things that human beings have done, isn't a trivial preoccupation given the fucken awful things human beings have done

like yeah sure people shd throw themselves into making the world less shitty but given we live in a society that actively promotes heightened shittiness maybe if yr passions run in non-horrible directions that's not the worst way you cd live

Five years of playing WoW has made me think that online gaming is actually making the world a shittier places, at least as far as MMOs are concerned.

well yes i certainly wdn't hold up online gaming as a flower of our culture but i'm being v. inarticulate here anyway

I went to GeekGirlCon today, volunteered for 12 hours, donated $10 to PP of the Great Northwest in exchange for those Social Justice Character Class pins, and saw thousands of people having fun celebrating inclusiveness and diversity in nerdy pursuits.

Anita Sarkeesian's panels had extra security and bag checks due to bomb threats phoned into the convention center.

Guess what though, it didn't stop her panel room from filling up at 10am.

Way XP, but there are definitely aspects where it is hard to keep a straight face - like, if you think that the Pressure of Society is stopping True Artists from Following their Vision, then that's kind of goofy in an Atlas Shrugged way, but if your model of these untrammelled souls is AAA video game developers, then you are a clown and no-one should ever take anything you say seriously ever again.

Anita Sarkeesian's panels had extra security and bag checks due to bomb threats phoned into the convention center.

That is really screwed up.

yup /:

is there anything a person can actually do about this stuff or

http://pattheflip.tumblr.com/post/99764532473/dont-be-silent-things-you-can-do-about-gamergate

Also, http://cathodedebris.tumblr.com/post/99675407383/so-just-how-popular-is-gamergate-how-many-of-them-can there's barely any of these people basically

oh good, there's probably less of them than there are of the Klan

like sand through the hourglass so our the games of our gate

i know this has been said before but i can't get over the "content doesn't matter if the gameplay and design is good!" party line spoken by people who nearly unanimously believe the "gaming is an art" mantra but apparently think it's the only artistic medium that should be exempt from sociocultural criticism. it's nuts. what does "art" encompass? "game is fun = good art. game is bad = bad art. bonus points if My Dear Baby Dove Aerith dies so many creis;_;~~~" this whole thing is such silly shit.

lol meant "game is not fun = bad art"

content doesnt matter its just a coincidence all the games we play have psychopathic content

I think for a lot of people "art" is garbled up with "free speech" as a form of the elusive "thing that's beyond criticism." Like the point of achieving "art" status for games is not to enter games into the field of discursive works that operate on each other and interface with society and human life etc etc, but to establish game creators as unassailable visionaries and game consumers as sophisticated patrons of art. This isn't how most people see art, so the dissonance is real: the more games are treated like art, the more the advocates for art-ness encounter the exact kinds of criticism they assumed art-ness trumped.

I'm generalizing obviously - I'm totally down with treating games as art myself and I'm sure many, many people who call for games to be "art" do not see it in the terms I'm sketching here - just suspect, based on my own times in geekland as a teen, that the position may not be fully considered and its proponents may not be entirely reflective or self-critical as they advance it, re: what it means and why they find the stance appealing.

i haven't seen any confluence of the "games as art" crowd with the gaters - aren't the hipster critics and artistes the ones being put down on the SJW side?

there is a weird gap between the indie types that actually create and champion "arty" or w/e games and the legions that are really passionate about shouting "GAMES ARE ART". i never really see the former caring too much about that specific type of refrain while the latter mostly just seems insecure about halo not being taken seriously by roger ebert. in fact the tone of gamers during #ebertgate sounds so similar to the GG people now. it wasn't indie devs saying "wasn't that the fat fuck who said games aren't art" right after he died.

xp that is certainly a part of it yeah

A lot of the people who make "arty" games have basically said "Fuck games" and "I hate video games" and things like that. They also definitely seem concerned with what they do from a "termite art" perspective, like thecatamites and his 50 Short Games. They don't seem to care to make the next Fez; they would rather make the next Mastaba Snoopy.

what does "art" encompass? "game is fun = good art."

Eh being fun doesn't make casual games GG-approved art though. Game has five billion explosions per minute, lets you blow shit up, does not try to trick you into having any silly moral qualms about blowing shit up, has rad particle effects = game is good art?

(Though yeah, in my limited experience the games-as-art crowd and the gamergate crew seem p. separate except when the latter thinks it makes a compelling rhetorical point, but there are definitely 'gaters claiming that it's wrong that Sarkeesian wants people to think about the role of women in games because if as a result of her videos even one game came out with a slightly different attitude to women than the one already drawn up by 30 dudes on crunch time and a board of directors that would be a Crime Against Pure Artistic Vision.

Any previous examples where a guy in a suit looks at the 3D models or packaging design and tells the art guy to make the token female NPC bustier and more scantily-clad = the team's singular artistic vision is only being enhanced; game companies de-nerf something or change an ending following gamer forum shitfits = just fine for artistic vision; entirely hypothetical possibility that one day the man in suit will come down and ask if maybe the token woman could wear a bit more on the box art and hey could we have another female character = oh no, artistic vision has been destroyed, ~~corruption~~)

Hah, I actually found this this morning, was going to post it as a follow on to my last post:

Gamer Dweebs (I admit I flinched a bit at the title, but I'm a big boy, I can suck it up.)

"Games are art, and they should follow the artist’s vision completely, unless that vision has people who aren’t like me in it in which case they should be removed, because games aren’t art, they’re a business, and a business has to do what’s best for the company to continue, unless that means including people who aren’t like me, because games aren’t a business, they’re an art, and you shouldn’t enslave art to financial and business principles like equal opportunities or whatever, because look at all those people who’ve made artistic games with their artistic vision, except those ones made by people who aren’t like me, who’ve failed because games aren’t art, they’re a business, and it just shows you that they don’t understand business otherwise they’d be more successful and prominent and rich, but if they are rich then it’s probably because they just exploited simple business principles or just had nice art."

https://storify.com/MorganRamsay/how-often-do-video-game-journalists-write-about-fe

Of the 130,524 articles downloaded from 23 outlets in a 12-month period, only 0.41% of those articles referenced feminism, feminist, sexism, sexist, misogyny, and misogynist. Less than half of 1% of the articles published by professional video game journalists for major publications during a 12-month period brought up these more progressive subjects explicitly.

@ezraklein
Whatever good points #GamerGate had to make are getting buried underneath the raging misogyny:

They don't have any good points though

exactly

well were never gonna know until we clear out all this misogyny god dang it

this is basically about defending the purity of metacritic scores right?

"beneath" all the misogyny i mean