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

Braid wore a trilby iirc

lol wtf

https://twitter.com/dankmtl/status/505101945976422401

needs more game informer
also notable lack of joystiq and kotaku, must mean something

Lolling hard at Jim Sterling being on there, the guy who called any woman who dared to disagree with him a "feminazi slut"

It seems he had a Damascene moment at some point in the last 3 years
http://www.gamingaswomen.com/posts/2013/06/an-interview-with-jim-sterling-about-sexism-in-game-culture/

why is there a kotaku uk

most 15 year-old nerds too lazy to learn japanese

I've been watching the feminist frequency videos over past couple of days (specifically the damsels in distress trilogy). They are seriously good/depressing.

Watched that one about women in background and sadly that bit from GOW 3 is typical. The first two games were cert good but with a fair amount of uncomfortable moments like that (not just against women).

Well, let me know if I'm seeing that scene the way you are. I haven't played this game, so I'm basing everything I know about it on that scene alone. The player gets an achievement called "I didn't do it... but I wish I did." I think this is meant to read "I didn't rape her... but I wish I did." The only alternative reading I can think of is "I didn't kill her, etc.", but that doesn't make sense, since he did kill her by jamming her into the door mechanism. It could be that the game designers are such morons that they think this wasn't really killing her, because it wasn't the entire and essential purpose of the action or something. I won't credit them with not being morons.

If the first reading is most plausible, then the idea of a rape achievement goes well beyond uncomfortable. I really didn't think mainstream games had stooped that low. And this is the shit that gets 9/10.

do all AAA games have boobs in them now? did the esrb throw in the towel?

i mean what the everloving fuck
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6075179/anita-sarkeesian-says-she-was-driven-out-of-house-by-threats
https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160/photo/1

feel kinda like "casual" needs to be removed from the thread title

just watched the FF episode; good work

They are seriously good/depressing.

lol

https://twitter.com/MichaelToole/status/503576805169586176

Huh, there's some serious overlap between anti-feminist vloggers and atheist vloggers.

Almost find the hundreds of people lining up to post variations on 'I don't support death threats but isn't the real problem how this overshadows Sarkeesian being wrong' creepier than the full-bore psychopaths.

it's weird, you'd think minds unfettered from primitive superstition wd be less fucken stupid

apparently doesnt help too much

was thinking like 90% of video games is just killing the hell out of thousands of human beings which is irl considered as bad or worse than sexual assault, and studies have tended to show that video games dont make people actually do murder, the defenders of said sexist imagery cld at least attempt to defend themselves by arguing that its an amoral symbolic landscape that doesnt operate in the same way as the real world, except that then they go and behave as exactly a literal projection of that same subhuman sexist garbage and completely discredit their whole scene and make life miserable for those just trying to get a word in edgewise

and these dudes being like "stop insulting 'gamers'!" right after someone has pointed out that a near-hegemony play video games, but people who feel the need to self-identify in that way are gutter trash who are acting like shitty games targeted to trash males is a way of life and not just a segment with disproportionate marketing budgets targeted to their shitty whims

like 90% of video games is just killing the hell out of thousands of human beings

Yeah, this is a fairly common "rebuttal" to the feminist critique - the idea that everyone is killed regardless of gender. However, it doesn't deal with the fact that only men are given agency in this landscape. The point is that women are only things to be murdered, whereas men get to be both subject and object.

(But then of course when you say this someone inevitably goes "well, what about Lara Croft?" and you have to roll your eyes and go, "oh, okay, just 99.99999% of games, then".)

'Feminism' Vs FACTS (Anita Sarkeesian DESTROYED!) by Thunderf00t 164,813 views

REFUTING ANITA SARKEESIAN's "Damsel in Distress: Part 2" by The Amazing Atheist 351,554 views

Feminist Hypocrisy by Tyrant60 73,227 views

Female Game Developer's response to Tropes vs Women by Doll Divine Dress Up Games 92,872 views

ah i see the amazing atheist is getting in on the action nice very nice

Yeah, this is a fairly common "rebuttal" to the feminist critique - the idea that everyone is killed regardless of gender. However, it doesn't deal with the fact that only men are given agency in this landscape. The point is that women are only things to be murdered, whereas men get to be both subject and object.

― emil.y, Saturday, August 30, 2014 8:05 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya tbh im not really too familiar w the whole conflagration, seems very dire tho, these gamers shd take a chill pill

I love these rebuttals. This guy's strategy is just to wing it for ninety minutes straight while getting increasingly drunk http://youtu.be/fuJeVV36NlQ

hes got rolling rock beer and a rolling rock shirt

oh I haven't clicked on any of these things why the hell would I do that

like unless these guys have proven that she fabricated all those clips they and we already know they aren't "debunking" anything

comedy

tbh I think my 1st post told the whole story on that score, not gonna spend my afternoon watching 90-minute vids of unpleasant misogynist ranting

http://midnightresistance.co.uk/articles/plight-grown-ass-gamer

How are you supposed to discuss cultural criticism with someone who genuinely believes that nobody should have the right to comment on a piece of art for fear of somehow tainting the sanctity of the artist's original vision? Or people who think that a games journalist being friends with a game developer is on par with Watergate? How is any adult human being supposed to 'hear both sides of the story' when one side is an egg avatar moralising about a grown woman's personal life?

I only watched about 10 minutes, but yeah, it was not a worthwhile endeavour. I just thought it was a funny example.

http://i.imgur.com/nnAi3M3.png

these people should be executed

https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/505781028615905280

#GamerGate is p funny

http://i.imgur.com/m1kpxBV.png

hm

That guy doesn't seem so bad from the Youtube vids I've seen. I dunno why he's identifying himself among those attacked by the 'end of gamers' meme. People are taking it too literally.

we must destroy all gamers

Sorry, I didn't see bit above until now about GOW achievement. I have nothing one way or the other to help clarify but going by old games on PS2 (pre-achievements) the most negative interpretation would probably be right.

Appalled at all the responses but especially at that screenshot of the twitter posts. Awful.

This hobby & industry is a cesspool

no wai am i going to investigate in detail but #gamergate is just gamers applying the language of oppressed groups to themselves in a way that is beyond parody, right?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php
not always a fan of alexander's writing or pov but this is pretty much otm

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DevinWilson/20140828/224450/A_Guide_to_Ending_quotGamersquot.php
and a few okay points as well here

^^I really like that post
All the games I like best have this quality: "We make and play fewer linear games about one person saving the world."
I tried watching Sarkeesian's latest video and I could not get v far into it – youtube started buffering at 3 minutes and I just took it as a sign to quit. Like, I don't need evidence of a bunch of games I don't play showing that women are great to be objects for looking sexy or chopping up.
At least Minecraft is really big!

Yeah, that's good. I think this deserves further investigation and unpacking (which I'm sure others are doing, in response or in parallel):

If our medium is designed for people to stay secluded for dozens of hours while having their egos stroked, then we reap what we sow in terms of the kinds of people who emerge from this pastime. We need to consider the very real possibility that the offensive behavior displayed by gamers in recent weeks is not unrelated to the artifacts they rally around (which I doubt are especially obscure). These people didn’t come from nowhere to fight about nothing. They came from games to fight about games. They’re organic results of the medium we’ve all played a role in cultivating, and they won’t go away if the medium doesn’t change significantly.

Was thinking about this earlier with regard to the kind of forum-responses discussions of any of the recent shameful events seem to get. There's a very consistent tone to the sniffing, know-it-all but user of "cool" profanity gamer-as-judge. There's a sort of character or posting style or actual personality that just appears everywhere on the Internet where 'gamer' types are too be found, and at a certain point you have to wonder: are games attractive to people who see the world like this, or do people see the world like this because they play a lot of games? (Or because they hang out on a lot of gaming internet sites.) Obviously there are billions of other factors here, not least race, class, and ahem gender. And I can't really articulate this that well, but there's something in the way these folks talk that overlaps and reinforces what they're saying. It would be really interesting to do a video series unpacking game scenes that encourage just generally being a bad listener, shutting your ears to critique of privilege, blaming victims...

I guess what I mean is that (loud, forum-posting type) gamers seem, versus others of presumably similar station in life, to be much more aggressive in pursuing and defending rationalizations like this nonsense about Zoe Quinn. I don't think it's enough to say that the "journalistic integrity" objection is a smokescreen for sexism, or that it all just stems from the attitudes of frustrated shut-in males who make up some subset of the gaming population but can't account for how widespread these kinds of statements are. Falling onto the "journalistic integrity" smokescreen is a key rhetorical act of sexism in this instance, and somewhere along the line, these guys are learning, from games or from each other or someplace else, that this kind of rhetorical act is fair play, makes them righteous and just and wise judges, makes them super-smart, lets them fold their arms in self-satisfaction and gaze down at the fools, women-fools, anti-gamer fools, feminist-fools, that peep and blunder beneath their lofty perches. Can can someone start making games that short-circuit that?

Isn't this fanboy rather than gaming-specific ugliness? (I just recently heard about the death threats for tepid batman and guardians of galaxy reviews.)