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

forksclovestofu otm. her vids aren't controversial but "gamers" have had it in for her since a while before this. she raised a bunch of cash on kickstarter to produce this latest round of vids maybe a year or so ago and i can recall a lot of similar nonsense back then. this has been simmering for a while

https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/522542896000802816

Yeah, smart move to get the fuck out of there.

Yeah, the Sarkeesian videos are painfully restrained to the point of potentially losing the viewer through their clarity, if anything. There are jokey asides, but the kind you'd expect in a lecture - mild, wry chuckle stuff. I suppose if you were looking for it, there's a certain didactic tone that could be (deeply) misinterpreted as smarm or know-it-allness.... it's night and day versus the style, tone and delivery of the typical gamer video that y'all were just discussing, where the point is mainly to celebrate or hate on a specific game (classic! dud!), with a lot of "wit" thrown around and a lot of persona-building for the actual speaker. Sarkeesian's videos doesn't parse that way. It's probably not a style of video that gamers are accustomed to watching really. That's a sideshow to the misogyny, etc. etc. but I think it's interesting in a "sub cultures that don't speak each other's language including tone and nonverbal cues" kinda way.

What's most amazing is how people are hooked on the idea that she's all about publicizing herself and getting attention, when aside from the fact that she is a person onscreen speaking stuff in the videos, she is so much less present as a "star" than anybody doing a Let's Play, an AVGN knockoff, a "retro games podcast of the week" deal, or a "This week on Greg and Steve play games" series. Basically the whole long shadow going back to Seanbaby and Penny Arcade where the secret dream is that posting video game shit on the internet will make you somebody. What's up, biotches, it's the Cheetonator here, and you know what that means! If you want to find somebody starved for publicity, it's there.

The conviction that the examples are "cherry-picked" or that some have been "debunked" because the given scene in the game is somehow optional, on the other hand, is willful point-missing that again I think reveals where everybody's real priorities are. Some number of Gamergaters may just be like an army kitted up to fight the last war - they're convinced this is about outsiders who don't understand video games and want to censor them, because that's what games have had to face in the past. More generally, though, I think to get really worked up about Sarkeesian's videos, you would among other things need to be someone who really hasn't encountered this kind of reading of other media, so that it somehow seems really crazy and excessive and out of the ordinary. Combine that with someone handing you ready-made myths about feminism, and your own varying predisposition to misogyny in whatever forms you've seen/acted it out in your own personal life (slut-shaming, victim-blaming, etc. etc.) and it snowballs into basically mishearing the intention behind absolutely everything said and done, on-camera or off.

I guess another aspect of this, which I hadn't thought about before because I've played a lot of video games and don't find the contents of the videos totally unfamiliar, is that the real fear is that Sarkeesian's videos are being consumed by outsiders, by people who don't play video games, and that for this audience they will play strictly as "look at these sick games and imagine the sick people who play them!" Geek culture has a lot of foundational narratives that involve being misunderstood by the wider world, sometimes comical in hindsight (say, Chick tracts about Dungeons and Dragons), sometimes still understood as a tragedy writ large (Seduction of the Innocent and the Comics Code - which really WAS about censorship and demonization of a medium!). If you're inclined to think in those terms, then you might be inclined to think Sarkeesian's videos are intended as such an anti-games, anti-gamer witch hunt, when that's not the case at all (and indeed GamerGate is the actual witch hunt). This also means that every bit of media attention the videos get must be seen to such a person as part of the campaign to destroy games, and thus basically anything Sarkeesian says or does is an attention-seeking scam to ~lure~ people into her ~cause~. This desire to silence her or read the message as insincere attention-seeking is really obviously undergirded by the misogynist text, just as in GameGate globally the misogyny takes particular forms that are pre-scripted by old gamer stories.

Steve Hogarty @misterbrilliant · 23h 23 hours ago
All #gamergate had to do to marginalise women in the industry was sit perfectly still. Things were pretty shitty for women to start out with

Steve Hogarty @misterbrilliant · 23h 23 hours ago
Instead #gamergate has done a marvellous job of highlighting misogyny in games. Like cockroaches teaming up to turn the kitchen lights on.

xp

Yeah, the one thing that keeps popping up in the back of my mind is that we fought against the PMRC back in the 1980s. And we didn't have twitter, but we had Anthrax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poTA34hKbZw

well this mess made the front page of the new york times. here's hoping national attention embarrasses law enforcement/the FBI into actually tracking down the people making the threats.

god i hope this is real

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0D2bkVCQAEzoyC.jpg

https://twitter.com/jayd3fox

one would think that someone trying to orchestra a sincere, respectful boycott would change the name of the account they are coordinating everything from to something other than "ChinaGirl BigDick" but I guess that's #GamerGate in a nutshell

lol

lmao imagining kids attempting to get their grandparents to write letters on behalf of video games

Steve Hogarty @misterbrilliant · 23h 23 hours ago
All #gamergate had to do to marginalise women in the industry was sit perfectly still. Things were pretty shitty for women to start out with

Steve Hogarty @misterbrilliant · 23h 23 hours ago
Instead #gamergate has done a marvellous job of highlighting misogyny in games. Like cockroaches teaming up to turn the kitchen lights on.

― bizarro gazzara, Thursday, October 16, 2014 5:29 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

false flag natch

sounds more like a black flag op

it is rare that occam's razor argues so hard in favour of false flag. it would be so much easier for me to believe that this is all the product of conspiracy or just irony or trolling than it is the sincere opinions of real ppl with some degree of capacity for rational thought. i guess i am just naive. i guess my heart is just too big for this world #cardiomegaly

people never understand Occam's razor

is that the most obvious explanation tho?

who doesn't understand occam's razor? is that the same ppl who don't understand rhetoric or different ppl?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0FBWe0CEAA4Cao.png

lonely guy, thinking baout #GamerGate

lonely guy just investigating baout games

omg lol

*hi five*

nice, very nice

xpost would post my character high-fiving yours but they used up all the precious kilobytes so you could play as a GIRL

http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-man-who-sparked-gamergate-regrets-the-harassment-but-say#1fte2i0

perfect url

“I don’t, like, have a passion for games or anything,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“I don’t, like, have a passion for games or anything,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“I don’t, like, have a passion for games or anything,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“I don’t, like, have a passion for games or anything,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“I don’t, like, have a passion for games or anything,” he told BuzzFeed News.

Asked what he would say to women who have been terrified by death threats and anonymous harassment, Gjoni said, “I can’t deny my letter was the spark. I guess I feel compelled to offer an apology to them. But also I don’t know how to do that without taking the responsibility away from people who are actually doing the harassment. But, I guess, let me know how I can make it up to you?”

more like, said while confusedly scratching the top of his head with one hand while idly tugging on his scrotum with the other

harder to do than it sounds

this made me lol for some reason

If I could go back in time and tell myself not to do this. I wouldn’t. That is, I wouldn’t tell myself not to. Because it’s for the best.

possibly because it's fucking stupid

“I spent the better part of a month planning all contingencies,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I gave this outcome an exceedingly low probability.”

lmao for srs m8 wow

The math checks out. Culture war: 0.4% probability.

*ponders time travel and the nature of regret*

We spend so much time making fun of these guys for being dependent upon their moms and here we have ironclad evidence that if at least one of them had been more dependent upon his mom, this whole shitstorm wouldn't have happened.

Real friends don't tell friends to write blog posts whining about their failed relationships

seriously

9,000 words is 20 pages single-spaced.

Gjoni, who emigrated with his parents from Albania when he was 6, had been recruited to the position while he was still in college. Recently, his supervisors noticed that he looked haggard and wasn’t getting much work done, and asked him if he wanted to resign. Gjoni said yes.

“Internet warfare takes a surprising amount of dedication,” he said. Indeed, Gjoni, despite his protestations that he wrote thezoepost for ethical reasons unrelated to gaming, seems unable to leave the cause his writing sparked alone. He admits to regularly advising GamerGate leaders, and seems to take some pride in the power he claims to exert over the movement, as well as over the effect the movement has had on gaming journalism.

“I’ve had to…keep it from splitting the earth in two,” he said.

you deluded arrogant incoherent narcissist

like, even if he did feel he owed the world something to warn against someone else being emotionally manipulated or w/e he could have just made his point in two sentences

"Hey y'all, my ex cheated on me; avoid her" <--- see, you can do it in one sentence

he's very 24

Part of this belief seems to stem from his assertion that “thezoepost” was not a misogynistic character assassination, as it has been painted online, but a “callout post” detailing Quinn’s purported misdeeds and hypocrisies as an emblem of social justice. Indeed, Gjoni told BuzzFeed News, as he has written elsewhere, that he considers himself a social justice advocate.

that was the sense I got from his screed--that it was mostly about knocking his ex off an SJ pedestal

that is a very generous reading

it was a revenge blog about an ex attacking her at the angle he thought would hurt her most
I don't see how that's a charitable reading

it implies thought, which is a charitable thing to grant to this dummy

and it implies his logic makes any sense whatsoever

the constant need to find contradictions in others by dredging through minutiae is not how you relate to other humans