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

feels like it was only yesterday that "do you come with the car" "OH YOU" banter was pretty much the norm. when did that stop? when E3 was last open to the public?

i'm pretty sure it's still the norm at these international weapons dealer conferences except it's "do you come with that surface-to-air missile?" and "get out of my dreams and into my amphibious assault humvee"

flashbacks to http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/SwYQrHIVgaI/AAAAAAAAGQ0/0OrqMYy9Q-Q/s1600/DealCentury1.jpg

pretty much the most disheartening week ever for me. this whole thing is just disgusting. meagan is a friend and former colleague and frankly some of the stuff that happened to her was things that happened when i worked with her that i was unaware of. this shit is terrible and i'm not sure it will ever change. a hobby filled with mean, angry little boys. the comments she's been dealing with on her blog and various comments sections and facebook this week have just been unreal, i can't even fathom people anymore.

another blog from these week, more, complicated i guess, and even more depressing, can't even believe some of these stories

http://trixie360.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/sexism-in-games-a-mea-culpa/

but we've all been passively complicit in it, every fucking person in the industry myself included & i don't know where to even begin.

do u know who the journalist is?

no. i can't really get into specifics but we were involved in the reporting on an incident relayed in her original blog post regarding someone that worked for a publisher.

http://meagan-marie.tumblr.com/post/46396481491/what-would-you-do-if-you-werent-afraid#_=_

i did not attend pax

to my knowledge said person is not employed at that publisher any longer

fwiw, i sub'd to GI for many years bc it was not puerile, sexist, maxim in video game skins like all the other mags. a force for good imho.

i know you avoid posting on ILG m@tt since it runs a lil too close to your day job but i really appreciate you stopping by here to take a stand on this issue form an industry perspective.

that trixie360 blog post was good, wish I'd set myself on fire instead of reading the comments though

I mean I know this is basically the one constant truth of the internet but there I went

i feel like the funny ("funny") thing is that the motives of a lot of (not necessarily "most" but maybe?) people in industries that tend to traffic in casual sexism and even racism aren't taking part in advancing it because they themselves find it "admirable" but because they're cynical and feel like this is just giving the people what they want, and tbh their own careers matter more than mildly suggesting that such elements be toned down. i speak from another perspective in another industry which certainly has people working through the moral quandaries of sexism and the odd bit of winking racism, and unfortunately the ones who runs things immediately-to-far above my standing are the ones who more willingly embrace it.

anyway somewhat off topic.

i'll probably start an ilm thread but fwiw, i am producing this talk regarding (somewhat tangentially, we'll see) sexism in the performing arts programming industry:
http://www.housingworks.org/events/detail/noteworthy-a-conversation-with-women-at-the-forefront-of-the-nyc-arts-progr/

M@tt, are you going to Pax Prime this year?

Nah with a 2yr old I avoid travel if I can, e3 & gamescom for me this year, though I welcome our new once monthly pax convention overlords

But yeah like forks said I don't go to ilg because I'm way too glib & chatty on ilx & I think the only way to be a game journo anymore is to have complete & total paranoia about the internet, but yeah this the treatment of a friend in regards to this stuff was just so gross I had to vent

Bioshock is pretty great tho

is that a new game or something?

What's Gamescom like?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI

This video showed up in my related videos section. it sucks shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI

Sarkeesian is such an easy target for internet trolls. I honestly wish she were a little more challenging and interesting but she's still among the better video game essayists if only due to the low bar.

i am somewhat amazed someone made a ten minute video refuting zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

is casual racism a big issue in games? seems like sexism is a much more pervasive problem. not every game is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

yes

http://kotaku.com/5836692/that-weirdly-racist-npc-in-deus-ex-human-revolution

I've never gotten the clammy chill of racism from punch out, at least not to the extent I get from seeing actual boxing.

Because I've not played the game, I don't know (and the article doesn't say) whether there are other black characters in the game, which would seem to make a difference - if she's one of many, and the many don't sound like that, then saying "Surely there won't be anyone that sounds like this in 14 years!" is not in itself a good look.

Well the title of this thread is that it's more accepted in videogames than in other media. I'm not really seeing that. Feel like for every Deus Ex that gets called out people call out a Transformers.

Transformers is practically one long videogame cutscene

a good portion of it is the multiplayer/internet culture, but yeah it definitely feels like racism is more normalized in gaming

there's been good writing at kotaku on this issue

http://kotaku.com/5897227/come-on-video-games-lets-see-some-black-people-im-not-embarrassed-by

http://kotaku.com/5985340/this-is-how-we-get-more-black-people-in-video-games

http://kotaku.com/5987766/this-is-why-we-need-more-black-people-making-video-games

i disagree with the idea that video games need to follow the models of other media to fix racism/sexism since the other media is largely the source.

uh

not parsing u philip

the caricatures come from movies/tv/comic books -- which aren't doing a better job than video games at least on the commercial end.

lol that's a steaming pile

well, let me walk that back, i still dont understand what exactly youre saying

...

1) The caricatures come from more than just movies/TV/comic books; they come from music, they come from the stage, they come from historical scientific studies, they come from conventional wisdom, they come from old wives' tales, they come from EVERYWHERE

2) Tyler Perry has built a gigantic media empire off of a series of movies that encompasses a broad spectrum of the African-American experience. There was an entire renaissance of black filmmakers spearheaded by Melvin Van Peebles and continuing on through Spike Lee, the Hudlins, and John Singleton that explored different facets of black experience, to the point where modern movies have a spectrum of black characters to offer consumers, including some caricatures.

2) Ditto with television, where entire networks have dedicated themselves to showing multifaceted black characters (TV One, sometimes BET, OWN, Tyler Perry's terrible TBS show)

3) Comic books have been way out in front of this for a long, long time, stretching back to the introduction of characters like Black Lightning, Black Panther, Luke Cage, Storm and the entire Milestone universe.

Basically you have no idea what you are talking about.

well specifically i'm saying tyler perry making video games would be counterproductive (having a milestone comics of videogames i'm less emphatically against, but there's other reasons why i wouldn't be optimistic about it), but i'm also generally against video games looking outward for a corrective in a place that doesn't look much better by comparison and is also the source of a lot of the problems.

so really what you're saying is "I can't read" because no one is actually advocating that Tyler Perry start making videogames

philip what it seemed to me that you wre saying is that strategie sthat have been used to pursue diversity/humanizing people of color in other medium (i.e. just introducing enough characters of colors to be able to express a diversity of common, humanistic sentiments) is not valid for video games because the video game industry makes more money nowadays than movies/tv/comics? i really don't understand

speak for yourself bruh, i'd play a LucasArts-style Why Did I Get Married? xp

I'd argue that this is functionally equivalent to arguing that Tyler Perry literally make video games. In the very least, Tyler Perry literally making videogames would have answered this call:
"I hope it'll be sooner rather than later, but as long as the industry maintains its focus on blockbusters over everything, it'll be a long time coming. Which means that what video games needs is not just Blazing Saddles, but Tyler Perry."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurative_language