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

#notallamericanmen

that thing white american males do when they disparage 'white american males'

i don't care about sports. at all.

she's cheer captain and you're on the bleachers?

me neither

however, 2/3 of my (white, male, middle-aged) coworkers can speak to each other with some knowledge of the weekend's football games on a monday morning

I am sure geography and economic class have a lot to do with it

the remaining coworker who seems less sports-knowledgeable is fun to talk to about star trek

My office spends a lot of time talking tennis, it's kind of great

I wonder if that happens many places outside of the east coast

In the United States, I mean.

don't be dense, if my argument was "being into something = nazi" i would have just said that

to repeat andrew's observation again:

I'm aware of the very large gulf of analogy, but the tone of the language actually reminds me of 30s German anti-semitism: These people are responsible for the fact that it's not the days of glory any more, these people are invisibly in cliques in positions of influence (and can only be there for subterfuge as they definitionally can't share the same identity as you and I), these people must be fought against at all costs.

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, September 8, 2014 11:00 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what is shitty about gamers is the same thing that's shitty about reactionary reddit-ism, about the zones elliott rodgers stewed in; i'd bet there are huge overlaps in terms of the actual people too. the maladjustment, the paranoia, the crippling lack of passable familiarity with adult life. it's something that people need to keep an eye on.

do you think there might be less trenchant ways to express the idea that some gamers long for days of glory than comparing them to nazis?

nah not really

Days of Glory does sound like a WWII sim

can you think of better ways of describing seeing something malignant brewing in the society around you

yes, my mind does not immediately go to nazis whenever we discuss social ills

you could say "gamers are kind of like the Klan" but I don't see that going over any better

that tumblr did!

unless the comparison is like - gamers are just like nazis in that both have a heavily industrialized program of exterminating untermenschen... i just don't see it

i think andrew captured the similarity in attitude pretty well

given what i've seen on 4chan i wouldn't be the least surprised if a lot of these dudes didn't turn out to be straight up antisemites too

I meant to post a longer version of this last week, but didn't get around to it:

When video games first appeared on the scene, there was no reason they would be specifically male-targeted. There were creative people, some of them outsider-types creating these things for whoever was interested. But, like many other things, when something reaches a certain level of mainstream acceptance or popularity, it gets *colonized* by the male-dominant, intolerant segment of society that creates this hegemonic power, driving out diversity and self-policing in terms of what is "allowed" in the community.

The fact that this exists in a form that encourages people to play alone in their homes or in fairly anonymized online environments makes it easier to dismiss marginalized people, namely women. The plots in games upholding masculine tropes and the general culture of being a _male gamer_ is self-congratulating.

It's like the youth version of the good old boy network idea -- people like us are meant to be on top, we make the rules here, make sure you keep anyone who isn't like us down.

Historically, the software development profession had a similar arc -- many of the first generation of programmers were women, but once people decided it was a profitable profession (or one that could have more prestige than acting like programming = typing = secretarial work) it became male-dominated. The fact that games used to be a lot more of a programming practice than a content-creation practice means there's a common thread, too.

Antisemitism is def a part of 4chan xp

I was rolling my eyes at a comment on twitter about "growing up playing games by Roberta Williams so I didn't know gaming was sexist" but there's a seed of truth in that. Gaming really only went fully dude-colonized in the 90s.

Autism is def a part of 4chan xp

:/

Wish you wouldn't use that as a perjorative, forks

Ugh - no offense to anyone in particular, but do we have to use this thread for general purpose "are games art" stuff? And we just did volkist antisemitism (regarding Queen) pretty recently - though tbh there I do get the relevance here. Worth unpacking particularly in terms of the stakes of getting to feel (with very little commitment at first) the rush of joining and belonging to a "movement" against these "öutsiders" causing the problem. You're both the rebel against the infiltrators that have taken over the system - one of the few who sees through the sheeple lies - and the silent majority, the Zerg rush - one of the many who "really" constitute the community. Fandom has a lot of that in its bones; some of it I think is proto-fascist, some of it maybe not.

re: the deathofgamergate tumblr post - I agree with Andrew Farrell that it could go much more richly into underlying causes - in particular I think it could engage MUCH more with gender at various levels of the analysis. But as an entry-level summary into the bogosity of the "movement" I do think it has some nice things to say. This captures something important IMO:

Gamers are not being vilified for the mere act of playing games. They’re being vilified for constructing and nurturing a subculture that readily allows fiascos like The Zoe Post to take hold. One simply doesn’t see this level of sustained, community-based harassment in other spheres of media; not even comic book nerds would have the gall to conduct themselves in this manner. To throw up one’s hands and whine “#NotAllGamers!” is to abdicate any responsibility for taking care of one’s own house - a house that desperately needs tending before termites destroy the whole foundation.

... basically, saying the responsibility is on those who identify as gamers, or participate in online gamer communities, to be allies for positive change rather than patting themselves on the back for being "not all" something, while quietly backing away from the scenes of trouble, in the name of "well I come to games for a fun escape, I don't want to spend the evening arguing with some guy over voice-chat in a shooter about whether rape jokes are okay or not."

It could be that we're in the early, most vitriolic and turbulent phase of a major change, as for the first time certain spaces and/or publications establish ground rules that clearly etsablish that X, Y and Z are not only not their scene but beyond the pale of civic discourse in the community. That's obviously going to provoke a serious whiplash reaction from people who assumed their whole lives that X and Y were totally the way the party rolled. Gradually, maybe, it'll become the kind of scene where if you want to spout misogynistic garbage and not get banned from the server/forum or whatever, you have to go to these specific all-asshole servers/forums. That would still leave huge spaces for all-asshole congregation but at least a) they would be forced to reckon with the fact that their view is a minority (maybe not very helpful - see Tea Party rhetoric) and b) newbies would be aware that it's a choice, and that the icky stuff constitutes one space which may not be the "normal" anymore. But I might also be writing fanfic at this point.

One unrelated thought I had, concerning the tropes and tendencies in fandom/game-nerd rhetoric that I was banging on about upthread: I notice that a lot of the enthusiastic sexist comment-leavers and forum-posters seem really, really comfortable with imagining really elaborate and complex false-flag, rope-a-dope and conspiratorial schemes on the part of "the media" or Sarkeesian or whoever else. Some of that may be garden-variety conspiracy theory, always popular when people feel the world changing around them in a way they think shouldn't be possible unless someone is up to nefarious deeds. Sure. I also think that games (and geek media generally) do tend to favor super-complex twist plots, the Joker in Dark Knight say, or Doctor Doom all the time ("I anticipate every contingency!"). And the thing is that in these media, these are the bad guys, but they're awesome bad guys, you love watching them carry this stuff out and there is a vicarious thrill in watching the super-impossible clockwork plan go its way.

So now, 14 years old and on IRC and excited to be hanging around with the big kids, you are very susceptible to a) proposals to carry out such a convoluted scheme (I really read this in the trying-to-sound-badass tone of the hangers-on in some of those IRC logs Quinn shared - there's clearly some mix there of those directly involved in carrying out harrassment and character assassination, and those who just like the way the words feel coming off their fingers) - - - and, b), believing that other people are probably doing this kind of thing. It's sorta like the confusion over "conflicts of interest," not understanding that journalists and critics often roll in the same social circles as creators... from the vantage point of someone who gets their information about conflict in the world from games, it might seem reasonable that when people disagree with you, it must be part of a coordinated plan to gain favor for their "agenda," lure in the unsuspecting, create a cover story for the impending D-Day of their master plan, whatever.

(sorry for tl;dr, whenever I write posts in notepad things go horribly wrong)

haha lol at the weird office keyboard adding an umlaut to things when i'm talking about nazism

xps yeah, that sounds about right, re: the 90s

Some of that may be garden-variety conspiracy theory, always popular when people feel the world changing around them in a way they think shouldn't be possible unless someone is up to nefarious deeds.

otm

comics definitely had a dude infusion in the late 80s/early 90s as far as popularity and subsequent content production went

if the endgame is that video game fandom matures into sports fandom (and i think in many respects this has kind of already happened), there won't be much improvement on the horizon.

can't wait for old-timey george will baseball curmudgeon romanticism vg fandom

I was rolling my eyes at a comment on twitter about "growing up playing games by Roberta Williams so I didn't know gaming was sexist" but there's a seed of truth in that. Gaming really only went fully dude-colonized in the 90s.

― ⌘-B (mh)

I'm sorry, but video games have been sexist and misogynist for a long, long time. If you went into an arcade in the early 80s it was "macho" nerd heaven. Just look at the creepiness of the dudes in Chasing Ghosts - the alpha nerds of early 80s videogames - and it's pretty obvious. The internet allowed more casual players to be exposed to the well established norm, thus perpetuating and spreading it further and driving the roots in deeper. It's a bigger tree than 30+ years ago, but the seed was planted at least that long ago.

competitive video gaming is a whole issue to touch upon; i mean, especially if you're gonna compare WoW to Street Fighter to Starcraft, they're all different, even in degrees of machoness

I don't think I meant to say that the video game environment was idyllic or not misogynist at any point

xp to 龜: i don't think I was! but lots of spectrum-y people certainly gravitate toward that more codified and obsessively structured world, myself included
fwiw, my girl works as a teacher with autistic students and i have done some work in that arena as well so i understand the reaction

it is true that sometimes someone's rampant sexism is greatly undercut by their sexy female night elf main character

(apropos of nothing, I clicked on another thread and read "Not all messages..." at the top and it made me think of this thread again)

I don't know what's undercutting about the fact I like to stare at night elf ass all day, DJP

(real thing that was cited in an article not long ago about the "female character"-playing sexists)

http://media3.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/070815/070815_BillyMitchellPacMan_hmed_2p.grid-6x2.jpg

ha

I think the only female character I ever created was a female Tauren (hunter), because it was ludicrous and hilarious that they tried to make them sexy cow ladies

i thought you grew up in the midwest

Xps pejorative use of "autistic" is the language of 4chan. /b/'s cringe threads are basically opportunities to post screencaps from facebook and tumblr to call out people's perceived autism.

lol goole

my folks rent land to a dairy farm, too; still never gonna get busy with a cow

xp to bam, well i don't know that environment well enough to get that connection so i'll shut the fuck up now.

I gotta find that "Billy Mitchell" episode of Regular Show

female voice actor for mass effect way superior to the male voice actor imo

I want to play a 'Mordy' text adventure.

they're out there. warning: they are not fantastic.

http://scarygoround.com/scare/strips/20140908.png