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

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

Aubrey Norris ‏@Chupacaubrey 28 Mar

Do you love zombies?? Do you hate nudity??? Enter the @threadless design contest for @deadislandgame & win prizes! http://www.threadless.com/deadisland/
Promoted by Aubrey Norris

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

site's audience != site's commenters tbf

They reckon about 1-2% comment. And as always it's not even a majority of the commenters that are terrible, just that the bad ones are like dragging a comb through your brain every time you read their megaparagraphs of MRA nonsense.

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3733057.htm

Nice article. A harsh assessment - anyone who's played through B:I want to chime in?

Errant Signal also has a good new video about this. It does seem pretty weak, though I don't really recall B:I being promoted as an intelligent piece of art any more than a cool steampunk game.

They've definitely talked it up as such, at least to the gaming press. The article does some justice to their attempt. However, the ubiquitous TV ads definitely go in the direction of steampunky manshoot.

I haven't gotten far in the game but far enough to see the "throw the ball" section he mentions in that article as well as the "history exhibit" section... a few people i have spoken to are all losing their minds over this game for being clever and arty of course (these are the people who thought the same thing of the first game though which is just o_O to me).

thing is i am not sure i would put these comments in the "casual racism" thread because it doesn't feel racist so much as it just feels profoundly fucking stupid (and maybe kind of irresponsible in its stupidity) -- imo mr. golding hits the nail on the head.

ehhh it's not great but i would rather have a video game that acknowledged ugly parts of american history, even in a glib facile way, than not. baby steps yall.

i wish yoshi's island acknowledged the ugly parts of american history

definitely some robber-baron critique going on with wario

wario is a hurtful stereotype, probably. i'm not italian so

an australian video game criticism article was more effective at making me interested in an american history thing/what that american history thing means than the game it's criticizing did. tbf i'm non-american... but still.

honestly though this is less about the acceptance of racism/sexism in games tho and more about BI not being very good at being a mature story or w/e

I think you're right about that, tho the whole rickety crashing end to the story really is fun. Except for all the press f to trigger next cutscene approach