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

meet-the-sexist-racist-pigs-o.html

the linked article doesn't seem to work at the moment. here's a cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/sexual-harassment-as-ethical-imperative-the-ugly-side-of-fighting-games#/entry/signin

This may be the first time in the history of video games that someone had said that removing sexual harassment is ethically unjust.

the naive world of 2012

sh@kedown your pt about the casual mobile games (the silent majority of games?) being closest to the ancient atari and arcade units in terms of pure ludic experience with not much narrative hook at all is really perceptive

gaming media has been creating bro gamer culture forever. i remember reading the most sexist shit in gaming magazines when i was growing up.

I bought at least one games-oriented computer magazine every month from about 1989 to 1999 and the first few years seemed like a gentler time -- though it may just have passed me by, as I was too young/naive to pick up anything risqué and may have shrugged off "gurls r dumb" jokes with "huh yeah other girls are dumb, just as well I'm not like them" etc, ugh @ me.

(and legend suggests platform rivalry was already a thing in the 80s, although I don't remember it much among my friends or in magazines: mainly just envy of other formats' fancier screenshots, excitement to go round to your friend with a different computer and a whole different set of games, etc. Spectrum vs C64 gets talked about as a rivalry but I didn't really hear any until my friend's brothers arguing Nintendo vs Sega circa 1991.)

In the mid/late-90s I began to feel alienated by token pictures of hot women on the cover of "games and general interest computing" mag PC Format, increasingly laddish/aggressive humour in the games-only mags, etc, but the echo chamber of internet comments, forums and online gaming banter do seem to have made everything a billion times worse. On the other hand the internet allows me to hear about and find indie games and not-very-gamey thinkpiece games etc, so swings and roundabouts.

tl;dr curious what the female editor of my 80s favourite Your Sinclair magazine thinks of "gamergate". Fairly sure she got dismissed by jerk game marketers and crepey letters back then but I'm guessing nothing like the death threats and men's rights warriors of now?

it's worth noting that game journalism would not exist without the efforts of Joyce Worley, who along with Arne Katz and the late Bill Kunkel, founded and created Electronic Games magazine

i remember Speccy vs C64 being pretty real in that sports fan banter kind of way

games magazines of the early 80s are awesome because they mostly read like amateur newsletters written by people who are baffled by this new thing they've been asked to write about, reviewers telling you the game is in colour or features machine code

oh and i guess Amiga vs ST probably started in the late 80s as a thing?

well duh - gaming media has been creating bro gamer culture forever. i remember reading the most sexist shit in gaming magazines when i was growing up. they taught that culture to their readership.

― Mordy, Thursday, September 4, 2014 10:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think this is true. the scene appears to be occurring on social media now: the anti-feminist youtube personalities, the twitter harassment waves, the centrality of 4chan. gaming media outlets really seem like a step behind this stuff. as if a young man of today needed a magazine to teach him how to be sexist in the first place. what is terrible about this culture is self-emergent

fwiw i don't think 'bro' has the right connotations either, with its air of frats and jockiness. "gamer" writ small thinks of himself as a put-upon nerd right? the aggression seems anti-bro if anything. bros get what they want! they don't need games!

That would be where the irony is re: last paragraph?

Growing up it was already Nintendo v. Sega (played out on bloodless/bloody versions of Mortal Kombat) and then Nintendo v. Sony (where it wasn't just cartridge vs. CD and load times but also about "kiddie", wholesome games vs. the gorey and murderous games like Twisted Metal)

games magazines of the early 80s are awesome because they mostly read like amateur newsletters written by people who are baffled by this new thing they've been asked to write about, reviewers telling you the game is in colour or features machine code

― Daphnis Celesta, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:09 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i interviewed kunkel before he died and katz. they were from a different world, the primordial stew from which "nerd culture" emerged...they all attended the first sci-fi conventions that started happening in the late 60s, basically a scene that sounds like it was a slightly nerdier outgrowth of hippie, tellingly their first publication was a general interest sci-fi/culture/music zine named Dead Flowers after the Rolling Stones song....they all three had a revelatory experience in Las Vegas at an early arcade and decided to cover this new "hobby", which was then just that not an "industry"

yeah i get the vibe now looking back on some of the magazines i read as a kid that a lot of the journalists were hobbyists who weren't specifically into "games" at all, and that stuff gradually expanded until it grew into its own magazines and a lot of the general "PC User" stuff slowly died

nice piece m@tt and it hits on a key point most of us seem to be dancing around: if everyone is a gamer (which more or less 70% of the population is if you want to go by the "if you play an electronic game on your phone, tv, tablet, console you are a gamer" definition) then we are all gamers even if we don't self identify... so why do we need the definition? Who the hell identifies as a "TV Viewer" or "Movie Watcher"?

The waters around "gamer" are so poisoned from thirty or more years of predominantly chauvinistic and jingoistic marketing rhetoric that it seems to me only the most sophistic of views could justify keeping it around as a desirable self-identity for most people. (Some) games evolved, (some) gamer culture did too - but the monolithic, multi-billion dollar murder simulator racket retains primary ownership. They can have it; I'm happy to secede.

a scene that sounds like it was a slightly nerdier outgrowth of hippie

growing up, my best friend's dad was a dude like this, super fascinating scene. early rennaissance fairs, tolkien fandom, gary gygax, SSI games, the macintosh, underground comix, branching into older game enthusiasms like poker and chess which have their own crazy ancient subcultures and traditions of course

These youtube/4chan gamer dudes strike me as elliott rodgers types more than bro.

u.m.sh@kedown I did not know about Joyce Worley, thanks! also I liked your article

DC I guess I was just too young then, my two best friends aged 8 had different 8-bit micros from me/each other but I just remember being like "cool, I can play games which don't exist on the Speccy". considered mentioning Amiga vs ST but my post was already rather long and Eurocentric... (yes, Atari and Commodore weren't European but AFAIK their machines were bought in much greater %s if not absolute numbers outside the Apple-then-console-dominated US)

I guess I came to Spectrum magazines when that "type-in listings for post-teenage hobbyists who may own or be considering buying multiple computers" era had mostly given way to "games magazine for format partisans" but yes, I do like that vibe in the earlier mags. Special mention for games where you can't press Break and see the BASIC listing!

never forget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer's_Revenge

special mention for 2 hours of typing in a ZX81 game only for the ram pack to wobble and wipe the whole thing :\

^^^ not a gamer

the aggression seems anti-bro if anything. bros get what they want! they don't need games!

― goole, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:12 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That would be where the irony is re: last paragraph?

― 龜, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:14 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right well yeah

aside from the misogyny i read a real discomfort with the codes of adult life in general from these dudes. the accusation that quinn had sex with a writer from kotaku for press has somewhat broadened into a general complaint that indie game developers and games journalists all... know each other. "things are happening that i don't understand because people being social in ways i can't access!"

flip thru enough twitter convos and you can sense the fear that there is some kind of SJW mafia that is not only going to critique games but determine what they will be

i was gonna say it's interesting that an overtly about-sex game like leisure suit larry has disappeared from the scene. but then there's internet porn now.

there's still a small but alive community around "adult interactive fiction" and other sex-oriented games

^^^ totally shagged Arianne

a guy's got to have some company sometimes :/

growing up, my best friend's dad was a dude like this, super fascinating scene. early rennaissance fairs, tolkien fandom, gary gygax, SSI games, the macintosh, underground comix, branching into older game enthusiasms like poker and chess which have their own crazy ancient subcultures and traditions of course

― goole, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:22 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah totally, throw in Omni Magazine, the old Games magazine which was more like mind puzzles and shit

i mean the whole tech industry from steve jobs (whose co-employees at atari called him "chariman mao" behind his back and complained about his b.o.) on down is really an outgrowth of late hippie

i would think the root of a lot of this DIY / headshop / meganerd stuff is Whole Earth Catalog, no?

we had a copy floating around the house iirc

still fun to flip through: http://www.wholeearth.com/back-issues.php

Ayo forks if you want my mags ilx mail me otherwise I'll recycle them in a week

I did! Did you not get my mail? I'll try again.

Fb me then

lemme know if you just got that

'Not that there's a neutral word for "foodie" either'

hungry

Got it xp

gracias!

it's amazing how many different aspects of this i couldn't give a fucking shit about

― Daphnis Celesta, Friday, September 5, 2014 9:11 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so I guess Zoe Quinn had saved loads of IRC chatlogs of tragic dogfuckers orchestrating the gamergate and discussing trying to hack her, and now a lot of part-time dogfuckers are having to go "...oh..." and back away slowly?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bw1grxjCAAAYEQV.png:large

got a pretty intense wave of pathos washing over me right now

https://storify.com/public/templates/card/index.html?src=//storify.com/strictmachine/gameovergate

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.858347-Zoe-Quinn-and-the-surrounding-controversy?page=563

just in case you lose track of how these people think, members of the "cause" rationalize this too. Also this weird hangup about "the media" - who? What?

So, am I the only one not seeing the big deal about Zoe's IRC 'leaks'. I mean it was a public IRC that anyone could join and there was nothing bad about anything she uploaded.

Why are they saying we've to hate on a guy that got cheated on at least five times and forced into a nervous breakdown by his ex?

These youtube/4chan gamer dudes strike me as elliott rodgers types more than bro.

― LIKE If you are against racism (omar little), Friday, September 5, 2014 12:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lot of nerds being labeled bro these days and its just not right not everyone u dont like exists on the hipster-bro continuum

Yeah, I agree with that. Many of the games are bro-y in various evident ways, and many of them (esp. shooters) are popular with bros, but it's not 1:1 at all, and I suspect a lot of the really distorted "never been out of the house" circles have relatively few bros in the room. But I really don't know. Like I figure WoW and Final Fantasy are less bro-y fandoms than CoD and God of War, right?

yeah it's kinda lol that these punks want recognition for their easily purchased AAA widely-advertised blando gaming habits; can you even beat hell in cave story+ bro?

If the internet has taught us anything it's that nerds are worse than jocks when given the chance

Thing is that jock types are generally dbags for a brief bout of junior high and into college and then they become normal dudes who don't even remember the people they pushed into lockers for better or for worse, whereas a lot of these nerds just spend the rest of their lives post-high school in a state of simmering hate and nursing grudges against a whole type of person that didn't "get" them back in the day or fucked with them.

"They thought the people who will die 500 times and keep getting back up in Dark Souls would fold" is priceless, so good it kinda has to be a parody.

That's the beauty of 4chan, you'll never know!

If the internet has taught us anything it's that nerds are worse than jocks when given the chance

OTM to the nth.