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

a part of all this is i've come to think a lot about the difference in how gamergaters etc (are allowed to) act and how they think. when i was more of an idealist these were totally connected. but thanks to the horribleness of the internet and its many comment sections i've had to unlearn the idea that brown vs. board and the voting rights act actually coincided with less racist thinking in america, that they were blunt-force acts that weren't at all predicated on massive societal shifts in thought but shifts in political pressure and etiquette etc. that racism isn't only still alive in concealed, lib postracial attitudes but that there are literally tons of people who would vote to repeal interracial marriage.

i guess what i'm saying is i value action and success more than ethics and conduct! but i am equally cynical about advances in either esp under late capitalism which has ruined my own personal utility as a human being

this is all just a long bloated way of me saying i'd feel guilty boring everyone with my long bloated personal story esp under the guise that it would have gg-related usefulness, bc i am forgetting that 90% of this thread is really just making fun of embarrassing tweets and who gaf anyway. ignore me

Aren't the statements on online boards also actions though? Both ILX and 4chan? Shifting the words and stories would be shifting the actions, and if only the harassment typed online stopped, that would be 99% of the GamerGate harassment, right? But I worry I'm misreading you.

i think lag00n and me are both approaching that idea from different angles

i was very passionate about internet discourse activism (feministfuckboyism well-documented here) and my mind almost immediately drives me into that "how is this helpful" arena, so i have to force myself to stop viewing discussions about nerd psychology etc as attempts to enact real change bc i'm not there anymore, i'm cynical about what you're saying (again -- mostly bc capitalism). i see it as the wrong avenue to get to a place other people aren't necessarily interested in going.

that came out bad, when i say "it" i'm not arguing w/what you're saying just about what my brain defaults to.

now that this convo has shifted to my own personal psychology we can all go back to the nerd brain shit

since ilx is largely a "progressive" space isn't conversation supposed to augment understanding moreso than change hearts and minds? and doesn't education have an inherent utility, in that especially in a complex field like politics you have to know the nuances of the field if you are to act meaningfully?

augment understanding -> "let's go down the rabbit hole"

no thanks

sometimes at the end of the day, getting in someone's mind is less important than making sure their actions don't harm you

continued from my last point... the discourse on twitter -- a more public arena -- seems to have real value in that there is an urgent need to combat the rhetoric of the gamergate people... to disturb their narrative. politics, and feminist and anti-racist politics particularly, really is about conversation, or the making and unmaking of narratives. so on ilx we can refine our own narratives and on larger stages we can try to make sure that the egregious narratives of gamergate et al gain limited traction. if, that is, we choose to tweet which i don't, really

yeah but like, i don't think "the rabbit hole" is useless. and i also don't think the repeated attempts to shout down or discredit hateful speech is useless either. the latter especially can be very taxing though

mh otm, it's not like anyone here is in danger but it's more important to ensure people are safe from abuse and physical attacks and changing the hearts and minds of a million fuckbags isn't the easiest path to achieving that. but this is ilx and sure people want to discuss things w/e

we're sort of running in circles wrt "does talking things out on ilx = something that ends up effecting actual change" and we can sure talk that out in a conversation that eats its own ass in the casual gaming racism/sexism thread but i am... cynical of the usefulness of that discussion

they have no narrative, just contradiction of anyone who disagrees with their hashtag, whatever the fuck that means. there is no agenda other than disruption and noise.

Gamergate may literally be the least self-aware collection of people I've ever seen. As someone who has ASD, the likely ASD of a sizable chunk of this audience is no excuse. I'd compare this to the dearth of self-awareness typical of a lot of talking head mainstream conservatism, but that's much more reactionary contrarian posturing.

Come to think of it, attacking Depression Quest—a game designed explicitly to engender sympathy in its players—is probably the worst possible thing that can happen to the social development of these people.

if they're not repeatedly and intelligently called out as hateful assholes more impressionable young people are at risk for getting sucked into their worldview, hateful and dumb as it is. if they are just noise then we need to send a strong signal. i think people like brianna wu are doing something important by going on tv talking about how not OK the threats are, even if the specific people who are issuing the threats are a lost cause

also thinking about where these people come from and why they behave as they do seems useful too. bigots and harrassers don't come out of nowhere; they are produced by a culture, our culture. it seems like a good idea to try to build a world where reactionary attitudes are no longer appealing.

so that involves getting more women in the video game industry so it's not just a totally male-dominated world. but it also involves other things. like, why do these people come to think of themselves as unlovable losers in the first place? this self-loathing, mixed with male entitlement makes them feel like they aren't getting what they are "owed" and then life is just toxic quicksand from there. so this cycle needs to be broken. impossible as that might seen. but it should be acknowledged as a pattern first, which is the point of these discussions. i think.

Lately, I've also thought a lot about Glenn Greenwald saying the Joseph Campbell heroics of gaming informed Edward Snowden's sense of morality. I don't know what to conclude from that, but it's interesting that it can lead to both Gamergate and Snowden.

Also, this whole Gamergate thing has completely driven me away from gaming and writing about games.

One last musing: The real ironic thing is that Zoe/Anita/whomever else evidently care a lot more about games than whatever conservative sociopaths trying to latch onto Gamergate. Also ironic: their antics have given further credibility to Anita and she is probably the most noted mainstream gaming voice now?

Agreed with Treesh. I suspect I got, without realizing it, a lot of very positive influence in my general development from like, the FAQs of Usenet groups and other spaces I used to hang out on, plus the conduct-enforcement of older, established members. It was clear certain things were Not OK, that people who did them would be shunned, and I took that with me.

One of the miscellaneous videos linked from some Gamergate story had a developer dude arguing that AAA developers could, but don't, take certain steps to at least make it possible for good community standards to become normalized. I don't really know enough about how current multiplayer games work, but he was bringing up things like players could could have ratings based on up/down votes of other players, and that when you log on you could have it in your settings that you only want to join games/servers that exclude people with a lower than (x) rating. Maybe that already exists for all I know, but it seems like a really basic, first-step thing that, if adopted and used, would give that newly-arriving 13-year-old a sense, already, that there are kosher and not-kosher ways to play, and that the escape of games can be achieved, beautifully, without lawlessness.

the effort to reduce toxicity in online game environments is a complex and pretty interesting subject, and, at least for some companies that i know of, an on-going project with teams of people that are dedicated to working on it. there are a lot of reasons a simple player-behavior rating system like that probably would not really solve the problem. league of legends, for example, has a report system in place so you can report a players behavior and explain what they did, then this report goes to a "tribunal" which is a website where you can read through tons of these reports and vote on whether the player deserves a ban. anyone with a league account can log in and vote to ban or pardon reported players. or at least they used to be able to, idk if the system is still in place. sorry for the digression.

Interesting and relevant IMO!

I was picturing something much more basic, without tribunals or account review even - just that everybody has a rating they carry around with them, based on votes of people who play with them.... like a seller rating on ebay or something... and if you don't want to play with anybody who has less than a 95% rating, you don't have to. But yeah there would be lots of potential pitfalls there, not least the inevitable efforts of trolls and shit-starters to undermine the system by negatively ranking everybody, or whatever. Sigh.

Tho a lot of games that do a lot of that stuff still have p toxic communities like League etc

oh yeah, league is incredibly toxic, they def haven't solved the problem at all. but they release stats sometimes, like ~90% of reports of a user using homophobic language gets voted to be banned, x% of users who get banned never have it happen again. stuff like that. they are also really open with their thought process about how they go about trying to deal with toxicity, like how they don't want to create a "ghetto" of toxic players all playing together, and that they believe most players who get reported are usually not bad-behaved, but just have outbursts after a few frustrating games and stuff.

I find all that really fascinating. Also think a lot of this is a serious "these things take time" thing where if there are positive impacts they will be subtle, and apparent in hindsight years later.

most players who get reported are usually not bad-behaved, but just have outbursts after a few frustrating games and stuff

lol well this is 100% wrong

ime most gamers, like nerds everywhere, access ban-worthy language bc it's what they base their horrible senses of humor on

continued from my last point... the discourse on twitter -- a more public arena -- seems to have real value in that there is an urgent need to combat the rhetoric of the gamergate people... to disturb their narrative. politics, and feminist and anti-racist politics particularly, really is about conversation, or the making and unmaking of narratives. so on ilx we can refine our own narratives and on larger stages we can try to make sure that the egregious narratives of gamergate et al gain limited traction. if, that is, we choose to tweet which i don't, really

― Treeship, Saturday, October 18, 2014 9:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah idk i think it does have value but people are also super grandiose and discursive and when all u have to do is yell at people on twitter and thats achieves the highest virtue of activism you just get a lot of people jerkin it in public which is pretty uncool to be around

i have a lot more sympathy who are just mad and telling people to fuck off than those who make telling people to fuck off on the internet their personal project

and fyi the word discourse triggers me

anyone whos funny gets a pass of course always always

xps I wish I could remember which game(s) it was, but I'm pretty sure those kind of community policing systems have been tried and of course, gamed, by mobs or clans in massive negative downvotes as attacks, similar to the gaming of sites like reddit and digg. That's led to these kinds of rating systems being purposely obscured to the public so that they can't be so readily abused, but obviously they're not super-effective either.

If twitter is one of our most visible public fora what are people supposed to do? It makes sense to want to use that space to voice one's opinions

voicing ones opinions is fine man its the pretending that theres more going on than that thats kinda a downer but i mean people shd follow their hearts i dont doubt that a lot of good work has been done in the tweets

btw is a law that all vlogs start with "hey guys"

alls im saying is i truly believe the worst thing on the internet and maybe in fact in the world is... SJWs

haha a good stance to take w all this is that #gamergate and #SJWs deserve each other thats the real clever shit right there above the fray judging all so tite

can this be over soon, so bored

it's weird to think about but actively creating / contributing to an environment wherein sjw types have every right to feel embattled kind of subtracts from the terms validity as an insult

I want to believe it could help to chart the exact paths of this stuff, but I couldn't actually say why, or how - maybe you're right and these are rocks whose undersides are best not seen. Maybe I'm anticipating some next campaign, in PSAs or editorial content or how games are reviewed or some brilliant psychological Trojan Horse of a game - that, knowing the tropes and myths and emotional pulls well, could thus effectively detour or short-circuit them, or offer alternative ways of filling the same needs. I dunno, I'm kinda out of my depth here.

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, 19 October 2014 00:19 (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so like far cry iii and spec ops the line both have a claimed reputation as attempting to undercut the narrative that makes gaming hateful but both in a way that is totally having their cake and eating it too

i wd like a game where you are a soldier who spends half his time building wells and shit, that wd be interesting

Guy I know was in desert storm for the air force & had someone mail him acid so he spent time walking around the base tripping and listening to cassettes of Dino Jr and stuff like that

alls im saying is i truly believe the worst thing on the internet and maybe in fact in the world is... SJWs

― lag∞n, Sunday, October 19, 2014 1:09 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've criticized sjw culture many times (lol) for its groupthink aspects that iron out nuances by casting everything in terms of two-sided debates rather than multidimensional discussions. but it's good they're out there, on twitter, fighting misogyny and racism because otherwise twitter would just be a hateful cesspit with no resistance.

This whole thing has been a giant confirmation of Lewis's Law

it's good they're out there, on twitter, fighting misogyny and racism because otherwise twitter would just be a hateful cesspit with no resistance.

― Treeship, Sunday, October 19, 2014 9:55 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obvs i was just joking but this is also not true at all

I think the people complaining about social justice warriors would be a tiny bit more sympathetic if social justice wasn't a de facto obvious good that only full-on terrible people don't want

Also if these douchebags were actually smart, things would eventually get better for them but fuck then maladjusted morons; I glory in their pathetic, hateful loneliness.

#ElitismHasAPlace

well i never

they all seem very damaged. this doesn't excuse what they say or do in any form or fashion, but still. sending rape threats to women who complain about the glaring disaparities in the video game industry? it doesn't just seem like sexism to me, it seems emblematic of some larger cultural rot that i am not intelligent enough to fully understand... i felt the same way about elliot rodgers. the idea of these people out there who don't recognize the humanity of others in an even minimal sense, and find validation for their views on the internet. misogyny is the hateful ideology that is most ready to hand, but it could be something else... idk how to even begin to address all of this. maybe it is as simple as dismissing the antisocial bigots, holding them fully accountable for their choice to not be a part of the human community.

well it seems pretty easy to let them all act as one basket full of hateful crabs if you never have occasion to interact with them

well I guess that doesn't hold; the big problem is them targeting women who disagree with them in any way

sure, i'm gonna trust crab advice from someone called crabbits
no, actually i agree - as horrible as this behavior is, just plain shunning and berating them isn't enough of a solution

on some level i feel like its just another symptom of the endemic cultural alienation and loneliness sweeping the post industrialized world, like they seem to just not have that much exposure to society at large

take away their game genies, that's what I say