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

http://kotaku.com/microsoft-says-they-regret-holding-gdc-party-with-schoo-1765770862

Hours after hosting a “women in gaming” luncheon at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft threw a party with scantily clad dancers in school girl outfits.

yeah this is sad. just unprofessional.

On the one hand, people are def going to lose their jobs over that. On the other hand, they really should.

the comments are pretty amazing, shades of "isn't this what a nightclub is like, with dancers and stuff? i've never been to one, just seen them in movies and video games" and "most of the crowd probably couldn't afford to go to an actual club" (??)

love these experts on a social scene they perceive exists outside their realm

well, also, people being 12 and 13 on the internet. not to excuse it at all but god knows what kind of totally wrong understandings of the world i had as a youth that are mercifully unrecorded thanks to the nonexistence of comments sections. i remember thinking based on the print dates of letters to comic books that it was normal for it to take months for a letter to move through the postal service, and getting gently disabused of this on usenet. can easily see myself believing/assuming all kinds of things about the mysterious, elite world of 'night clubs.'

otm i have seen the same comments people saying they go to clubs all the time and that's what it is like at all of them, lol sure, ok

the comment i read was like "well, i'm a white dude in his early 30s so i'm not really a nightclub goer" and it's like... who do you think is at these nightclubs

"What's the cover? Where should we park?"
Stay at home just once for a lark.
They say "Now don't be a stranger."
It really don't matter to me
I'd be willing to wager
That it don't matter much
if we keep in touch

http://kotaku.com/microsoft-says-they-regret-holding-gdc-party-with-schoo-1765770862

Hours after hosting a “women in gaming” luncheon at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft threw a party with scantily clad dancers in school girl outfits.

― onimo, Saturday, March 19, 2016 2:28 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Honestly this is just a case of them doing the same old thing and not realizing how easily things get out now, that's just a regular old stupid E3 party setup from the early 00s they probably didn't think about it

i expect that's exactly what happened but it's still not cool - i'd have hoped that #gamergate and femfreq (and simply the shifting gender demographics of gamers) might have sparked a bit more self-awareness at microsoft but obviously not :(

Honestly this is just a case of them doing the same old thing and not realizing how easily things get out now

^
describes pretty much everything wrong w the industry

not sure what to think about the recent treehouse drama. i'll have to ask my wife- nintendo is about the only gaming either of us do these days.

There's a whole thing happening around a character rendering/pose from the game Overwatch right now. Does anyone want to bother reading stupid comments on stupid reddit threads about it or should we not bother getting into it?

maybe not coincidentally, the latest femfreq video talks about sexualized character animations

RPS has a decent summary:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/29/overwatch-tracer-pose/

The grown-ups acquitted themselves well, the man-babies are generally melting down but what is new? You might if you were inclined raise an eyebrow at Blizzards 'clarification' "No, we didn't like it anyway, this was just confirmation", though it's amusing to see it turn the "As long as the developer was going to do it anyway then their views can't be questioned, silly gnats" wing of GG against the "What's wrong with being sexy?" wing.

not sure what to think about the recent treehouse drama. i'll have to ask my wife- nintendo is about the only gaming either of us do these days.

I wasn't following any of this and I'm just reading about it today, but man, that is a terrible move on Nintendo's part. Their statement on why they fired her is really bad too. It's not enough just to assert that you're anti-harassment.

Yeah it really felt like an ass-cover on their part. And anyway, even if she was let go for other reasons it doesnt diminish how she was harrased (accusing her of pedophilia ffs) for something she didn't even do at Nintendo. How fucking malicious and stupid are these GG peopl ahhhhh no dont even bother answering that :(

http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem

“Find another hobby or you’re going to die.”

ban all gaming imo

ban all multiplayer gaming

also, ban gamers

Ban men tbh

That is an upsetting read.

Upsetting and unsurprising, which when I reflect upon it makes it even more upsetting; how did things get to the point where THAT is what is considered to be "normal"? That shit should NEVER be "normal".

unsurprisingly has responses that are nothing more than "this is bullshit, gtfo troll"

so depressing.

also i didn't know about those guys caught right before shooting up the Pokemon World Championship, damn

wait waht

linked in that article - last summer in Boston, apparently:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/pokemon-world-championship-alleged-shooting-plot-foiled/story?id=33279253

I thought we talked about that on here

maybe, too much of my memory is reserved for cheat codes

must have missed that one - fucking hell :(

https://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/if_you_dont_like_the_sjw_crap_ruining_games_do_not_buy_siege_of_dragonspear/page1

follow the link. there's apparently a negative review campaign by these sexists.

Am gladdened by how easily they are taken apart by rational minded commenters on that thread. The GGers are just so eternally trollish, aren't they?

not so much "trollish" as "stupid"

trolling implies "I am saying this just to get a response, regardless of whether I believe it or not"; these dummies greatly believe what they're arguing in, they just don't have a defensible position to argue from and don't realize it

They do have a coherent position: politics doesn't belong in games, politics being anything that doesn't conform to their own cosseted world of straight white boy supremacy

Oh, and it's okay to kill anybody who thinks otherwise

i'm convinced it isn't just GGers but either a problem with video gamers at large or maybe a problem with online culture? i signed up for Steam last year and it was the first time i interacted with a gaming-only forum and sweet jesus it was an infinite cesspit of tribal shit-talk and consumerist self-victimization.

Speaking of which:

http://www.zam.com/article/328/vaping-congressman-accused-of-using-campaign-funds-to-buy-videogames

San Diebro.

Ha I was hoping this revive was about Tracer / Overwatch Butt Controversy! BTW the animated shorts + trailer for this game are great space opera / superhero nonsense. So much fun.

Thanks to the silliness I've now gotten genuinely excited about Overwatch despite:

1. I hate FPS; they're incomprehensible and usually dull
2. I hate team FPS on PCs; talk about a niche audience I'll never be a part of

But seriously this lore makes no sense (I've read both the easily accessible wikis devoted to this game and nope) so I'm GOOD TO GO. Bright colors, weird characters, cartoon "physics," backstory that exists for no reason and basically about as well thought out as Pacific Rim, but no movie to justify any of it, this only gets better from here. I look forward to the inevitably phone game about collecting shit that I also won't play. This is the kind of inscrutable, inexplicable cultural artifact that I love caring about for no reason. It's pretty close to art, and for art, that's always been good enough.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/28/11318706/overwatch-blizzard-worldbuilding

I am so rooting for this to become Blizzard's gaming's "Smile"

Can we have a separate overwatch thread about my dumb opinions

is overwatch out of closed beta yet? it looks more fun than other blizzard games to me but i haven't gotten to play it yet

actual release isn't until May 24 IIRC

blizzard is probably a fun case for complaints about characters -- not sure if they still do this, but they used to have two completely separate offices for a lot of their games: one did plot/cinematics, and the other did the actual gameplay and in-game art/models. the plot didn't even come in until they were 2/3rds of the way done, especially on the first couple diablo games

Ah no, Overwatch has been designed very much around being one of everyone. That's why the original complaint mentions that there are eg sexy assassin ladies in Overwatch, but Tracer's not actually (been presented as) one of them.

There's a giant Russian female bodybuilder, a Korean pro-gamer with a mecha, an Egyptian jet pack security guard, a Swiss medic in a wingsuit, a French sniper, an English pilot, a Chinese climate scientist, and that's just the women. It's ridiculous.

From the article it sounds like the character/cinematics shop just started drawing superhero ideas on the wall and then later decided to make a Team FPS with MOBA elements out of it.

interesting, I figured it was the gameplay ppl just spitballing, and then the story side threw together some bios and decided why these people are fighting and wtf they are fighting for

they've definitely shifted into a "let's create an ongoing property" model, with recognizable characters showing up in other games

why make a generic RTS like warcraft when you can make some characters and then plop them into a card game, a RTS, a MMO, with a built-in audience that plays multiple game types! and the stuffed animals and action figures are for fans of any of the games

valve kinda stole their MOBA based on their own characters when they somehow judo flipped Dota 2 into their own IP. theyre also doing it in hearthstone and heroes of the storm.

overwatch is another animal, but I guess tracer is gonna be in heros of the storm as well.