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

Video games aren't under the shadow of anything, any more than movies are in the shadow of the written word

Man I am so sad that Ms. Pac-Man was an inferior game and was not at all successful

I think I just backslid on my idea to prethink my comments, but I will not back down on my support of Ms. Pac-Man.

Ms Pac-Man is clearly the best of the Pac-Man games

Yes!

"Pacman displays all the patho-obsessive characteristics that are the special achievement of the first generation peasant. Pacman does not live, he survives. Pacman does not know the freedom and enjoyment of the drift; he is locked in a Malthusian trap without cheat codes, doomed to struggle ad infinitum to overcome his hunger in the knowledge that the next meal will be even harder to acquire. To eat more is to be chased with added vengeance.

For the ghosts work does not exist, their quest to find Pacman and eat him is purely recreational. Failure is without consequence, the drift is theirs and their collective wandering strategies are an inspiration to every algorithmic psychogeographer. Their scatter-chase-repeat routine is a wonder in itself but their swagger in blue mode, when suddenly they are prey and may be eaten by their dinner, is the unchallenged masterpiece in the arsenal of experimental walking techniques. Again the ghosts do not encounter real harm when devoured, rebirth comes as a guarantee. The ghost in blue mode is in trickster mode, they are urging Pacman to eat the freaky corner fruits out of self-interest but also out of benevolence.

Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are not attacking Pacman, evil is not a useful concept in their carefree existence. They are the Magister Ludi's of crazy cookie land, enticing the pupil to work harder and to move further, to new level-environments. It is not necessary to eat, it is necessary to travel."

I don't buy that games would necessarily be coarsened by the outside culture to the same extent without the prevailing influence of movies/tv/comics etc...

These are the top selling board games, for example:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Toys-Games-Board/zgbs/toys-and-games/166225011

So board games aren't immune to the kind of licensing/genre nonsense that dominate video games but just looking at it, it looks like they do a much better job at making board games qua board games at least on the top-seller level. (the kotaku list for best board games looked very different!)

confession: my favorite board game was the one based on pacman where you'd collect marbles in this pacman approximation that the designers solved the axis-orientation problem by having him eat through an orifice in its butt.

http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/

To be fair, Cards Against Humanity's offensiveness is anything but casual.

Would you agree that it's harder to forge your own path and escape a set of cultural and commercial expectations when it is under the shadow of that other thing, though?

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, April 2, 2013 5:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, because you are still within the culture that has all of the baggage

― the pheromones of hot clothing (DJP), Tuesday, April 2, 2013 5:28 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

just gonna quote this response again, because it is otm

i'm with you guys on the inception matroska-ing of cultural shackles but to say they're equivalent or have the same influence at each layer...

Not really wanting to jump into this debate, but I thought this was pretty OTM:

it's material in that within these often ham-fisted attempts at appropriating cinematic narratives into video games that sexism/racism come along for the ride

Counter-example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_or_Alive_(series)

FWIW, I basically am in line with DJP's take here but sort of buy into Philip's initial statement, which I read not as ''games shouldn't borrow from cinema or comics'' as ''games shouldn't borrow from trash cinema and trash comics,'' which I think they kind of do, a lot. Superhero books have come a long way and there are a lot of talented creators consciously trying to fight the tide, but the tide is still there. I've read more stuff about gender biases (the way star artists are permitted/encouraged to draw women's bodies, the women in refrigerators issue, tokenism of female membership on superteams, the sheer numbers of men vs women working in the industry etc.) but I doubt the industry/community would do well on race either, see for example the shocking fan resistance to the idea of a non-white Spiderman in either comics or movies.

Again, there's been tons of progress! The internet brings out the worst in fandom but it also means there's been a visible push-back against all of this stuff. I would like to believe that today's male white geek is a little more self-aware than his equivalent twenty years ago, and that non-white non-male geeks find more material that doesn't alienate them. But there's still so much in geek-genre comics that should wither and die there rather than remain a continuing source of video game material. I'm sure that's true of other media as well but I do think comics are relatively speaking, behind the curve, if not AS behind as games.

(Outside superheroes it's another rodeo entirely. Would love to see a Dykes To Watch Out For game!)

(Catching up on those Kotaku links presently - good stuff, thanks.)

I think drawing off of trash cinema or comics is fine! It's just not the only thing that should get made.

I like trash, too! but better a game with original pooping mechanics than a boring adaptation of "pink flamingos"

answer to casual racism/sexism in gamse: develop original pooping mechanic

so I guess they were on the right track here: oh no! SPANKING VIDEO GAME! oh no!

just didn't go far enough

pii-u!

Holding out for the licensed Halle Berry ice-cream simulator, myself.

dying

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10567

no info available on the validity of the survey, whether it represents readers of the magazine or the industry at large, sampling methods etc. It's likely there's some kind of gender gap in salaries but this doesn't tell us anything likely to be useful or accurate.

you know i think i have needed a new screen name for a while, kinda tired of asking ppl to deindex

bbiab thread

i know that it's anecdotal but i have seen sort-of what would explain those numbers maybe. aside from the (very few) women i've known in places i've worked never ever ever ever ask for as much money as they're worth (there was this one place where my team of 6 had 2 women, and they were probably hour-for-hour the most valuable people on the team, myself included, and both were the lowest paid, bc the dudes came in puffed up w self-confidence). but also the wage gap is probably caused by the fact that females don't survive, because no matter how much the workplaces try to be inviting and equal, at the end of the day there are a bunch of dudes who work in games. And most of them are ok. But a few of them are creepy. And some of them are downright scary.

i am in a position of very very limited power (imagine the bottom of the food chain -- now imagine the person who writes plans for the bottom of the food chain -- there I am!) at a company that has it as part of their mandate to be inclusive and fair and inviting to everyone. And for the most part they're amazing about it. Far better than some places that I think I've complained about on previous threads (one place in particular where someone I know had his hours cut for COMPLAINING ABOUT SEEING HARASSMENT AT THE WORKPLACE) (and no it wasn't a white knight type thing, he was actually really really uncomfortable). But there's still sketchy shit. Casual homophobic, sexist shit gets said on the floor. I try to call people on it -- in fact, I've gotten kind of scary about it before -- but i'm getting fatigued. and i'm the only one calling people on it (in fact on a team of 11, i'd say 1 (me) actively discourages that kind of talking, 2 others dislike it but don't speak up, 1 more is maybe coming around on being a human being, and the other 7 just don't think there's anything wrong w/ the way we/they/everyone talks at the workplace).

this is kinda off topic bc this thread is about the content of games i guess, but since we're kinda talking abt the workplace i figured it was time to fucking complain

great that this display name was available also

I find that all quite germane! First of all, that climate matters and is important to the lives of people working in, near, or approaching the industry. Second, it'd be hard to argue that this wouldn't in some way impact game content, probably by quite a lot. What seems like a good idea or a well-rounded character or a funny joke in such a narrow environment with so mnay voices squeezed out, may prove to be...not so much when the game hits the streets. Or rather, it resonates with the marketplace which has itself squeezed out a lot of those same groups of people...self-fulfilling cycle.

Yeah you don't need to play more than about 5 minutes of something like borderlands 2 to realise that either there were no women at all on that team, or the women there had zero power.

(I'm only picking on borderlands because it's the latest in a very long line of games I've felt embarrassed to play in front of my girlfriend).

I remember seeing the end credits of Saints Row 3, where they have a crew photo slideshow, and being genuinely surprised that there were any women involved in making the game. There were maybe 3 out of 100? TBF that game is quite totally shameless about everything, not just its rampant sexism

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Chewing through someone's skull is okay as long as they are wearing clothes.

what a vile culture of spoiled stupid little boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYMOXSrpqCE&feature=youtu.be

what the fuck? Kill all involved.

what in the hell. how does that have a budget? how does that get made? who's sitting around writing that crap and narrating it and doing the titles and....christ

i'm afraid to ask, but what was that? the video went private

a Machinima.com "show" called Spanks & Shreds or something like that where model were dressed up as "rock chicks" and then spanked as they played Rock Band

Yeah, the preview image is still up, vid is down. I wonder how long before a copy pops up

youtube keeps "recommending for me" horrible anti-Sarkeesian videos with annoying names like "Feminism vs FACTS" and it's bumming me out to see them in my sidebar (also bummed out by whatever part of youtube's algorithm thinks I actually like these things) (Google does think I'm a guy apparently but I hope it's not showing these to everyone male because that would be even more depressing than being singled out for them)

so yeah, I probably shouldn't have clicked on that Spanks vid, it'll be another tick in the giant database of how much I love to watch creepy woman-hating gaming-related videos

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/06/misogyny-sexism-and-why-rps-isnt-shutting-up/

good article, I think? maybe a bit self-congratulatory in places but I guess the urge to say that is just the same as all those asshats shouting "white knight" so eh

btw recent internet shitstorms have shown me that my tomboyish childhood and my subsequent life as a computer geek are not the result of heroically rejecting male privilege so much as buying fully into male privilege with me as honorary male (itself a privilege of having comfortably-off scientist parents), rejecting womanly things as degrading

was gonna say more but it's tl;dr and off-topic since I'm not a games programmer, just a dumb database monkey who first learnt a smattering of bad programming because I liked games, and now two decades later I'm still on the bottom rung of a career I was never any good at but I never noticed because boys didn't talk to me (I can't be bad at programming - nobody else I know even does this stuff!)

(There's another woman programmer in my office. Are we teaming up to further the cause of women in technology? Hell no. We are competing for who can be more manlike, who can wring more pats on the head from the real men who do the "real work" and get the real recognition; both just trying to pretend we aren't women, that gender rules don't have to apply to us, but not making the same exception for the other. We're not helping anyone and I'm tired. Sorry for off-topic.)

do you want to make a game? this looked cool (though it is for flash)
flixel.org

that does look cool! tbh the ideas are missing as much as the programming talent and/or patience, but I still like to think one day the stars might align enough to knock out some crappy puzzle game, at least...

i read that article thinking that these were the tiniest of baby steps to explaining privilege, but it sadly is pretty warranted given the audience. it's still pretty sad how many comments (even on RPS' forum, since he turned off the comments for that post) are still hopelessly blind, feminism is evil, etc. eukaryotes, indeed

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/13/apr/misog9.jpg

Kind of odd to start off an article like that with this image^. But yay let's fight sexism.

what's the gender makeup of RPS like?

the readership or the writer/editors?

founded by four dudes, one of the dudes was replaced and then he was replaced. occasional features by women (notably, recently, the interview with the tomb raider writer), also i think the indie games column is written by a trans* woman

oh if it's only four people i'm not sure there's a lot they could do staff-wise.

RPS seems aimed at an older audience though, my disappointment was that the responses were no better than you'd see on Kotaku, Reddit etc. crapping on John Walker for laboring the obvious. But not so much because it was obvious, but because they are in reality, unradical sewer mutants. Sad lol at "you're silencing the debate!"-type responses to him closing off the article comments, even with him addressing that very issue

I forget the name of the game with that ridiculous Amazon, but I think it comes out pretty soon so I guess it's somewhat relevant