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

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.)

http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2f2uug/sj_media_is_trying_to_kill_gamers_10_articles_in/

Well it's all under the hateful bankrupt "nerd culture" umbrella but but gamers are worse & these type of threats have happened for a long time and to women I've worked with

One maybe more specific thing that doesn't map out super easily is how "don't feed the troll," standard internet wisdom, breaks down completely when employed to discuss real-life harassment, in ways that obviously turn it into advice to silence victims and suppress criticism. You'd think it would be really obvious that what's involved is not "trolling," but something else, and yet there's a great willingness to accept that it is and treat it as such. Is this just because the sexist and misogynist reading of the situation as a whole makes reaching for that excuse an easy out, or is there something about "don't feed the troll" that itself needs to be problematized at the root? (e.g.: trolls are innately harmless and annoying if left alone, and/or: trolling is a phase, something immature gamers do on their way to being the people now posting "don't feed the troll." Or: Consensus about what is a 'troll' is maintained by hegemonic groups that know how to mark insider/outsider opinions as fundamentally valid/invalid - and in correlation, anyone unable to recognize the supposed troll is the one really at fault....)

re: fanboy/nerd vs. gamer: would totally agree that this is a general problem, although of course many of your comics nerds (for example) are also gamers and vice versa. I'm just speculating, very idly and without much evidence, that it would be interesting to figure out if there are particular tropes or figures in gaming, or in games journalism, or whatever, that foster and normalize this kind of fanboy ugliness. I like the point in the article linked above about the lone hero on an epic quest - spend most of your time being that character and maybe it does things to you. I wouldn't be the first to harp on the popularity of libertarianism among gamers, for example. So I guess even more than games lowering male gamers' general respect for women or consideration of them as humans, I wonder if there are places where gamers learn the specific rhetorical strategies and tones that are used a LOT by sexist fanboys and not quite as much by other sexists.

so much crossover with "mens rights" people, especially in language and how they argue, like those red pill creeps. ugh.

And just zero language for talking about rights or privilege that isn't straight out of a Republican handbook or something - and this is in a group which I imagine (?) to be statistically more educated than the median. I'm thinking now of my students in the world of architecture, many of whom have not (due to the studio-intensive curricula in undergrad architecture programs) pursued many or any liberal-arts electives to speak of, and who are just very ill-equipped to talk with nuance about anything not strictly "architectural." Which is a problem first of all for architecture (since it turns out very few meaningful architectural problems are strictly architectural) but also for them as people: they're losing the chance to take advantage of their academic institutions' offerings that would make them more well-rounded and engaged interrogators of the world in general. I wonder how much of this might obtain in gamer-land.

Of course, it may be that the worst offenders really are just 13-year-olds modeling behavior they see in others (or in the games) as part of fitting in. But that too would be a whole nother area to investigate and push back against, and the feeling I get from reading any comments on any of these articles is that nobody wants to hear it, at all. I can totally understand the impulse for people who write on this stuff to just say fuck it, these people are not the core audience, can we just write them off as dinosaurs out of step with the mainstream now, please? It would be so great if the industry just pivoted towards better behavior and left the "hardcore" sexist gamers shrieking behind them. I don't really see that happening soon though.

that devin wilson post was good

btw doc all your posts otm

aw thanks, i kinda feel like i'm groping/speculating since I don't really hang out on these sites and haven't been a "gamer" of any stripe in over a decade except for the odd freebie browser game or w/e.

gameing is going to go extinct because of social justice warriors

its sad it was an art

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

this is interesting for sure

the ugliness of multiplayer gaming, the omnipresence of it, the rise of/mainstream acceptance of genres associated with it (that I gotta say, I personally dislike)... this is the stuff that really made me recede into a v specialized genre bubble. I'm skeptical that making games more 'social' is what's needed and that doesn't seem to be what wilson is getting at anyway... but like w/books, I actually really like the idea of enjoying games in isolation for long stretches of time and then thinking about what you got out of the experience or maybe discussing it w/ some friends. I don't necessarily think isolation is the problem here, but then again, I am an introvert...

Yeah, I agree that that's not what the piece is getting at - particularly, the "having their egos stroked" and maybe also the "dozens of hours" - my sense is that the daily time commitment for some of these games is really different in quantity and maybe in quality from the kind we might give a good book. If nothing else: it's okay to set the book down during some of that, shake off the cobwebs, remember that it's only a book, mentally argue back with the author, etc. The sense I get is that MMOs and multiplayer shooters are more demanding than that - look away for a minute and it's all over. But I could be totally wrong, I guess the players are also alt-tabbing to other windows to argue in forums and stuff. Maybe I'm just being crotchety and old - I really don't want this to just sound like some Concerned Parent Group worrying about what The Games are doing to The Kids. It's just, when I get hooked on a game, I totally get hooked - forget to eat, click again and again for one more round, the whole deal. And this is me playing brightly-colored solitaire puzzle games or whatever. If games that are primarily about ego-stroking, dominance and squawking sexual abuse to other players over a headset have that same power, I do think there's something to be said in wondering what kind of people will emerge from that.

The funny thing (as a fellow introvert, Alan) these MMOs actually appeal really strongly to introverts, I suspect! My MMO experience isn't that deep (spent a couple years on some stuff pre-WOW, enough to know it's dangerous for me) but as someone who's spent also spent a crazy amount of time - seriously, thousands of hours at a mininum - on competitive games (particularly FPS and fighting games), it's something that gives the barest semblance of social interaction wrapped up in an activity you already love compulsively solo, but with an infinite variation due to human opponents. Even games that aren't competitive, like Diablo or Borderlands, can be all-consuming as drilling up numbers is even more addictive when you have others to enable and encourage your habit, also buried in the same realm.

Having interviewed some pros, to be good at a competitive level is a fulltime job at least 6-8 intense hours a day everyday.... A friend of mine had spent one of the last 3 years logged into wow (back at the peak of that game)

these MMOs actually appeal really strongly to introverts

yeah, that follows. the 'infinite variation' thing does seem to be the emphasis, not anything truly social. good call.

particularly, the "having their egos stroked" and maybe also the "dozens of hours"

yep. and the endless un-critical consumption of things that are ultimately kind of hateful. and not even like nihilistic horror movies where you the viewer are being brutalized too and there's a weird catharsis there. it's more sanitized, you're in control, and you win.

This hobby & industry is a cesspool

― ra's al goole (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, August 31, 2014 1:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://quinnspiracy.com/godot.html

pffthehehe

I have an idea that so much video game discourse taking the form of Nintendo vs Sony vs Microsoft console wars sets gamers up for a combative approach too. It goes alongside the well-noted game aspects in that Devin Wilson post and fits in with his point seven on protecting value of investments. It might just be the communities I've happened to see, but I feel that mode gives a top down pervasive aggression that is in the interests of some of the most powerful companies in the business, in a way that you don't really get for any other media (it's more like sports, I guess? Comics which I know less about has two big mainstream companies, but less barrier to entry between the two of them?).

An interesting comparison would be to Mac vs. PC which also involves a big sunk investment where people really are unlikely to do both. There's definitely a rivalry there but I don't think it gets as aggressive. OTOH there are probably more gamers who have two or more current-generation systems than there are casual computer users who own both a Mac and a PC. Generally I think sports is probably about right, and similarly I think anybody challenged on this would say, hey, it's all in fun, we play up the ridiculousness of the rivalry just 'cause. But more generally the tendency to be in "camps" probably does things that we can't exactly chart out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NqU4_k4wrQ&feature=youtu.be

http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/2/6096163/developers-end-hate-open-letter

Cool, I guess, but from a developer's point of view it seems like the easiest possible letter to sign. How about a letter pledging to avoid racist and misogynistic tropes, or, in the case of reviewers, to dock points from games that use them?

That's already starting to happen in reviews from the more self-aware sites like Polygon, and naturally they always get blowback from the same idiots for "inserting politics" into their hobby

But you're right, it's super easy to sign a letter like that. I'm more interested in a developer of Saints Row coming out and saying he agreed with Sarkeesian. tbf the franchise has been getting better in that respect but it started off pretty terrible, as evidenced by plot points in SR1 and 2 used in her videos. (While at the same time, having possibly the the best non-hetero-normative gender slider that just about any game has had in SR2)

That video above is more sad to me than anything, that these nimrods exist

tbh i find all the #notallgamers "hey there's right and wrong on both sides here let's stop arguing about this stuff" clowns just as aggravating

yeah, pretty similar to the #notallmen thing, totally missing the point

if sarkeesian ends up achieving something I will feel bummed at being proven wrong /:

good attitude

johnny fiveaces ‏@brumbpo Aug 24

@Nicendeth @MichaelToole @Babylonian why do these turdmen always look like a Kane of Nod cosplay convention

irl lulz

http://whatculture.com/gaming/10-things-need-know-gamergate-scandal.php

lol wtf, every single one of these is like 180deg wrong

cant remember if gmart still reads here but v good article my man <3

uh that was an xpost referring to his p4ste piece

"Even the extremely controversial feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers posted a tweet in favour of #GamerGate"

Such diversity. Even quislings are in favour.

yeah, do not click on that whatculture article, it's super infuriating and awful, and it's broken u into a million ages so to read all of their bullshit you just give them even more clicks, fuck everybody

yeah.. when i got to #9 which was "everyone gets death threats, PSHAW" my eyes couldn't roll hard enough

it's broken u into a million ages

This is very true.