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

on some level its an obvs cover for social anxiety but damn man i dont wanna

greeeetings ladies and gentlemen im the investigamer *smirk*

I am not sure which is scarier, the idea that none of these people have social confidence or they do and this is how they convey it

he repeatedly says impartialty when he says impartiality through that whole video

when he means lol

the whole tone of nerds pretend jokey hauteur drives me insane they shd be executed

― lag∞n, Wednesday, October 15, 2014 5:29 PM (24 minutes ago)

irl fps

he also pronounces brandeis "bran-day"

the whole tone of nerds pretend jokey hauteur drives me insane they shd be executed

― lag∞n, Wednesday, October 15, 2014 2:29 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

my best friend from high school grew up to become one of these people and has his xbox user name tattooed on his arm and i run into him at like weddings once every few years and he is completely intolerable to be around. his whole personality is such a lame imitation of what a human being is like and yet that's like somehow the cool way to be amongst these guys?

(while listing mom's credentials as a scholar for "the completely non-partisan american enterprise institute" xp)

it's like can-day

http://media.ticketmaster.com/tm/en-us/dbimages/97660a.jpg

xp

he also pronounces brandeis "bran-day"

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, October 15, 2014 6:24 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha that is perfect

LMFAO

(while listing mom's credentials as a scholar for "the completely non-partisan american enterprise institute" xp)

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, October 15, 2014 6:25 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha yes i love how hes all "i did some digging" like hes an investigative journalist for googling the extremely obscure american enterprise institute

investigameive iirc

btw the very first line of their wikipedia

http://i.imgur.com/LQlKqcq.png

Lazarus long, jfc gtfo

Among the prominent former government officials now affiliated with AEI are former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, now an AEI senior fellow; former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney, a longtime AEI senior fellow; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, now an AEI senior fellow; former member of the Dutch parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an AEI visiting fellow; and former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, now an AEI visiting scholar. Other prominent individuals affiliated with AEI include Kevin Hassett, Frederick W. Kagan, Leon Kass, Charles Murray, Michael Novak, Norman J. Ornstein, Richard Perle, Radosław Sikorski, Christina Hoff Sommers, Peter J. Wallison, and Mark J. Perry.[9]

I mean it's this bullshit

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/users/uploads/9357/legion-doom.jpg

for all their hyper connected techlologism these people seem to not know anything about the world outside of video games

look at Lana Del Rey

lana was right

i watched one of anita sarkeesian's videos a few weeks ago and . . . it's awfully restrained?

'here are 100 well-documented examples of really fucked up portrayals of women in video games and women shouldn't be treated that way, in fiction or real life.'

it's not like she called gamers assholes or misogynists or acne-ridden child-men who lack empathy or social skills of any sort. what kind of threat is she? ppl complain about sexism in movies, but there's no shortage of comic book films because studios, game or film, follow the demand.

tbh this is the first time i've found myself thinking wtf is wrong with the kids today, so thanks for making me feel old, gamergate

also it's pretty fucked up that the correct ppl are petitioning a global corporation to resume advertising somewhere

these people are paper-thin enough they just fucking can't tolerate someone having a different opinion. not even that -- sarkeesian & co like video games, they just wish they were mildly different!

it's gross to see actual young persons involved on the conservative side of a culture war

zoe quinn actually makes video games, but not real video games, and they get good reviews, and 'gamers' are worried that this could lead to video games changing and we can't have that.

i knew there was something wrong with people younger than me

In a phone interview, Mr. Baldwin, who said he was not an avid gamer himself but has done voice work for the popular Halo games and others, said he did not condone the harassment of Mr. Sarkeesian and others.

good job NYT copy editors

he doesn't condone the harassment of any of her male relatives

sarkeesian's stuff isn't just restrained, it's generally obvious to the point of boring and that's part of why the vitriol against her confuses the living hell out of me. She's not andrea dworkin for crissakes; she's arguing some basic tenets of humanity along the lines of "all these naked women are being used as scenery and that's degrading" and this gets people upset?

evil rightwing politics have dragged us all down

for sure, people will say "I didn't agree with her take on X" but it's usually some nuance, not general disagreement. Maybe if it wasn't like shooting fish in a barrel, there would be less vitriol

there's a common common that she cherry-picks her examples of sexism, like it was actually difficult for her to find the dozens of samples she used
seriously?

common complaint

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?