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

I mean it sucks that some women are getting treated like shit \

sometimes I thinjk about my male students for whom I have a respectful, protective, kind esteem, which is mutual
andc that they hang out on reddit and 4chan and are probably monsters there
it's weird

it is def very weird

its amazing how people adapt to very weird shit completely effortlessly

one of my students was telling me about how terrible anita sarkeesian (sp?) is and how all feminists will try to lie and say you raped them
I was like 'is reddit your source – check some other sources plz'
he is such a smart, funny kid and he's nice to me but I am not sure I register as a woman or even a human

ugh

how can you not want to slap him upside the head

knowing he is not a fully formed human and none of us are

accusing the "GamerGaters" of all being mysoginistic and hateful towards minorities in video games, while barely making a mention about corruption in journalism - which is the actual issue here.

Because a bit of perceived payola or bias in a few shitty hobby magazines is SO MUCH MORE important and urgent to address than women being threatened with dismemberment nbd

They aren't even mad about payola though. They literally are mad that feminists exist and sometimes have opinions on videogames.

Yeah, I am trying not to accept that cos it is so dumb I cant even :(

i'm fairly convinced that gamergate is a handful of legit psychos, several handfuls of opportunistic men's right winger typers and a core of ONLY IN IT FOR THE LULZ trolls which makes abbott's story about impressionable youth super sad and makes me glad i grew up when the only shit that did that kind of damage was everything else around me but the internet

that's sad, Crabbits, but if he's nice to you and hopefully other women/girls there's hope that he'll work it out one day, like, "oh man why did I even believe that stuff when I already knew awesome women who liked the stuff I like" or w/e

Of course most of the #NotYourShield women/minorities are just made-up sockpuppets but there probably are some real teenage girls in there too and that's what's getting me atm. I was thinking of the mostly-male geek communities I was in as a teenager, online and offline, and how I would have said p. much anything to say "heeyyy I'm not like Other Girls (whatever that means since nor are any of my female friends and I've always had female friends who talk about video games and comics but somehow I've never stopped to think about that)! you can make whatever horrible jokes around me and I won't make a fuss. please let me be one of the guys!"

I feel like I only don't remember personally saying anything particularly objectionable because* I was lucky enough that the groups I fell into, while male-dominated by numbers, already had some smart, assertive women in who didn't let the conversation get too shitty and were good friends and role models for all of us. It makes me sad that any genuine girls out there might be cheering for GamerGate and all because they're like I was, just not that lucky.

(* OK, also partly through my own history-rewriting and always being averse to expressing strong opinions in public, but most importantly those other women. thank you to them)

To an extent it's like the US Republican party I guess, #NotYourShield is the PoC Republicans / National Federation of Republican Women / Log Cabin Republicans and there are enough people that if they're near and the rest are far away, it looks like balance, but it's just a trick of perspective, and outside the bubble very few are fooled.

For example, Gaymer X, the LGBT geek convention, got word that it was on a 'enemies list' and tweeted that it was neutral on the matter - and then 6 hours later tweeted "Yeah, we've listened to our fans and the message is Fuck Gamergate", to amazement and outrage on the part of GamerGate: "We have gay people on our side! You're throwing them under the bus!"

They aren't even mad about payola though. They literally are mad that feminists exist and sometimes have opinions on videogames.

Yup - Leigh Alexander's excellent article on actual corruption in video games is largely shrugged off in favour of focussing on SJW indie gamers corrupting games publications with their magical vaginas. I've seen one of them literally claim that the serious corruption doesn't matter because it's just trying to move metacritic scores a few points and who cares about them, but these SJWs are conducting an assault on the culture!

Yeah, really feel like ''corruption'' here operates in the main as like, ''contagion'' or something, some force that is rotting and destroying games. The ins and outs of payola and so on tend to bounce off the discussion b/c the movement's appeal is emotional, you join because games are under attack and ou can stand up for what's right etc, or in the worse case, to feel the thrill of joining the witch hunt/coverrt op/however else these people addled by decades of sophisticated murder-porn see the campaigns of harassment.

I really gotta stop thinking about these assholes.

Ugh, that is another really terrible aspect, the "They have picked the wrong enemy, we have been trained for years in how to struggle and never give up". #gatestgeneration

I really gotta stop thinking about these assholes.

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, 14 October 2014 13:46 (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think a fair part of the "payola" or "sex for reviews" garbage comes from the fact that the women initially targeted are strong voices for diversity in games and are engaged in pointing out misogyny in mainstream gaming. Anita Sarkeesian notably is the the creator of a video series examining misogyny in games, and Zoe Quinn, who was probably the first major target of these assholes, created a text adventure game about depression.

As cringe-inducing as it was, the beginning of the "journalistic corruption" angle re: Zoe Quinn was her ex-boyfriend writing a long screed outlining how she did him wrong, including her hooking up with a writer who had written a profile of her (not even a review) months earlier.

You know what? It does sound like it was a toxic relationship and she cheated on him. But the worst part is that his reaction wasn't to walk away, but to tell his sob story to the more toxic assholes out there so that he could get revenge. So there you have it, the people who are really into this are the type who will have a bad relationship and instead of getting over it, decide to turn their entire life into some vengeance quest. Ugh.

literally the only thing I got out of reading the sob story was "wow, this dude is pathetic and needs to get over himself" whereas the gamergate dudes read it and thought "women are the enemy!"

guy's sob story was unreadable and longer than the bible iirc

it was like "she cheated on me, then we got back together, then I demanded a comprehensive list of all cheating details, then I got mad, then I exchanged angry IMs with her like a petulant teenager, then I demanded blah blah"

and I thought I had too much drama as a youth

Ugh, that is another really terrible aspect, the "They have picked the wrong enemy, we have been trained for years in how to struggle and never give up". #gatestgeneration

― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, October 14, 2014 9:46 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao no this is the good stuff

as sad it this all is, the "Dark Souls prepared to fight against social justice" angle is hilarious
actually that sounds like a false flag, i'm gonna call it

iirc a lot of that screed by Quinn's ex was an attempt to show her an SJW fraud, because she had expressed a belief that sex with someone you're cheating on is non-consensual sex

Show her as

if you have the emotional bandwidth for it:

https://twitter.com/GGBeingSexist

well, he claims she expressed lots of things and still painted himself in a horrible light without even realizing it, so...

I guess the better way to address that is: who gives a fuck? If she said these things and acted in a hypocritical way, that is between two people. There are many people who I don't feel like actively devaluing in the public sphere despite the fact I might not get along with them as individuals. That goes doubly so for people I've dated.

knowing he is not a fully formed human and none of us are

― Walter MIDI (Crabbits), Monday, October 13, 2014 11:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is great thank you

its amazing how people adapt to very weird shit completely effortlessly
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 October 2014 04:02

Absolutely OTM!

Basically, these people are the products of the games they play. I know that angle's been suggested a lot in the media I've read on this and its the one takeway I do think I understand: these reddittoheads honestly approach this like they would a WOW or COD campaign or a fucking laser tag match.

its funny when previously cloistered subcultures pop into the mainstream and nothing they do makes any sense to anyone else, their smartest coolest dudes turn out to be incapable of even communicating to the wider world much less convincing anyone of their superiority

these reddittoheads honestly approach this like they would a WOW or COD campaign or a fucking laser tag match.

― Gumbercules? I love that guy! (Trayce), Tuesday, October 14, 2014 6:06 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i suspect they consider it good training for irl rather than seeing it for the artificial environment it is set up to guide them to success w/only the slightest obstacles along the way

theres obvs reasons people seek out these cultures and become so immersed in them, like theyre m/l the same reasons why everyone plays games just minus any self awareness

the artificial environment it is set up to guide them to success w/only the slightest obstacles along the way

This is interesting and worth lingering on IMO - - - I know I keep wanting to bring the content of games into play here, but this is a great way of looking at it that doesn't just focus on the manifest content of getting your thrills out of blowing stuff up and killing people. I mean, what kind of claim is it that you've struggled and gotten back up in an era where games are designed to drip-feed you bits of content at a very learnable, achievable rate? I'd be a lot more impressed if they claimed to have died a hundred times and kept going in some actual fucking hard-ass old-school game where there was no wheel-greasing at all to get you through and completely pathetic rewards for getting better at it anyway. I mean, they'd still be egregious shitheads, but I wonder if the rhetoric/social styling would be different.

yeah idk its still all games, there are no stakes, many of them are very cool but not like the best for life lessons

oh, no question! Not saying banging my head against the same impossible level of Blaster Master eighty times was good and character-building for me - just saying it might condition a slightly different form of gamer self-identity, particularly with regard to things that read to me as weird, distorted entitlement. The latter of course can be pretty basically explained as "well, sexism," but the thread title does prompt the question, why this form of sexism in this sub-culture?

yeah its an interesting question i have no idea, tho for one thing i doubt games wld be as popular as they are if they were harder

tho now that im an expert in league of legends http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/technology/riot-games-league-of-legends-main-attraction-esports.html it does seem very hard

By complete chance a mate of mine posted this Deadspin article just now on his FB that makes the whole mess clear in a not-exhausting/confusing manner

http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844

The key part I didnt know clearly:
"In August, the ex-boyfriend of an obscure game developer writes a long, extensively documented, literally self-dramatizing, and profoundly deranged blog post about the dissolution of their relationship. Among his many accusations, he claims she slept with a gaming journalist in return for favorable coverage.
...
Once Gjoni's breakup post was made public, with its sotto voce intimations of sex-for-coverage exchanges, this cycle was set back into motion and supercharged. It's important to note that the initial claim that sparked Gamergate was not only untrue, but totally nonsensical—neither Grayson nor anyone else even reviewed the game at Kotaku, and while Grayson did write about Quinn in late March in a feature about a failed reality show, that was before they'd begun their romantic relationship.

will it ever stop? this is making me sick. http://www.standard.net/Police/2014/10/14/Utah-State-University-student-threatens-act-of-terror-if-feminist.html

gamergate will stop in a couple weeks prob, misogynistic sociopaths will never stop

”They determined the threat seems to be consistent with ones (Anita Sarkeesian) has received at other places around the nation,” he told the Standard-Examiner. “The threat we received is not out of the norm for (this woman).”

wtf is wrong with people

As I was just saying on FB, lets just call this what it is - terrorism. Straighy up.

If I ever meet anyone who agrees with this shit they will lose the use of their nads, just sayin.

you won't b/c they won't leave their moms' basements tbh

the event has been canceled.

can i just

A gamergate is a reproductively viable female worker ant that is able to reproduce with mature males when the colony is lacking a queen. Most commonly occurring within the primitive species of the poneromorph subfamilies, gamergate females differ from their fellow workers by a combination of elevated fecundity and aggression-related mutilation of competitors' secondary sexual characteristics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate