I'm disappointed to see that embers from the inferno of GamerGate are clearly still smoldering here, because I feel like it means we missed one of the main lessons from the whole thing. GamerGate...
Exemplary
I'm disappointed to see that embers from the inferno of GamerGate are clearly still smoldering here, because I feel like it means we missed one of the main lessons from the whole thing.
GamerGate relied entirely on harm laundering. It was a misogynistic and hate-driven movement that used some Very Valid Concerns as cover. This is often summed up in the "Ethics in Gaming Journalism" one-liner, but that oversimplifies the situation and doesn't really capture the depth of the specific tactic they used. The tactic exploits good faith conversation as a cover for bad faith actions.
GamerGate relied on repeatedly driving Very Valid Concern talking points against others as a way of lending credibility to abusive behaviors. I'm sarcastically capitalizing that because a lot of them are overblown or are misrepresentations, but the truth is that some of those Very Valid Concerns are, actually, valid. There's a root of truth to some of them. This is what allows them to get some purchase in the first place. Also, the fact that these concerns are "slippery" at best is an asset to the underlying aims of the hate campaign.
The Concerns serve two purposes. For one, they make it so that criticism and negativity about the individual are normalized. How many times have you wandered into an online discussion about Anita Sarkeesian and seen positivity or agreement, for example? Every converation about her includes these Concerns and everyone gets into back-and-forths about how Valid they are. Most of the people engaging in this part are doing so in good faith. They aren't out to harass anyone, but they do want to address the Concerns. The Concerns are meaningful and important and resonant.
This is what I was interested in talking about back when Tropes vs. Women came out. I wanted to look at the critique, pull apart and examine it, think through it thoughtfully, discuss it with others. I quickly found this was nearly impossible to do with any fidelity though, because of the context in which her work got put.
The context is the Concerns' secondary purpose: they make it so that other harms are less scrutinized. While we're all busy talking about the merits of specific points in Anita Sarkeesian's videos and public record, the people acting in bad faith are sending her death and rape threats, and making video games about beating her up. Their hatred doesn't just apply to Sarkeesian, mind you. It creates a hostile environment for everyone, particularly women, and acts as a latent threat against people that would speak out in support of her. Speaking about Sarkeesian now carries a significant social penalty. By not joining the hate mob, you might be subject to it yourself.
This is a silencing strategy used by the bad faith actors that tilts the conversation about the Concerns in their favor. Now, the people who are levying the Concerns in good faith aren't getting good faith answers and defenses back, because many people that would say something have outright exited the conversation. Part of what allowed Sarkeesian to face so much hate in the first place was that many people were unwilling to speak in her defense, either out of a well-founded fear or because of social sanctioning when they did.
The bad faith actors used the good faith ones without their knowledge here. By driving the Concerns so hard, they made it so that any converation about Sarkeesian had to be about and answer to the Concerns. Any conversation about her will inevitably contribute to social erosion of the community, even when everyone there is acting in good faith, because it's impossible to talk about her without addressing the associated talking points. We're doing it right here, right now, nearly a decade later. Did anyone here know she has a recent series on Nebula called That Time When that's way punchier than any of her Tropes vs. Women videos? We're not talking about that despite it being far more current and relevant, because we're still rehashing the old talking points that were so persistently driven against her that they became inescapable for everyone.
The Concerns also frame Sarkeesian as a fundamentally bad person, so that when people did do bad things to her, our internal sense of injustice was deadened. By painting her in the worst possible light, they diminished the empathy and conscience that might have been activated in us when faced with all of the shit she went through. This is why a single cultural commentator with a relatively limited audience got portrayed as something so much more than she ever was -- an evil shrew out to destroy an entire gender, industry, and artistic medium; an outsider; someone who didn't even play or like games in the first place; an untrustworthy manipulator; a con artist taking people's hard-earned money.
How did this happen? Aren't rape and death threats so much worse than cultural critique? Weren't the actions of the hate mob far worse than anything Sarkeesian ever did?
Yes, and most people agree that rape and death threats are bad. Most people can also see some surface area for legitimate criticism of Sarkeesian's ideas (as we can in nearly anything). The latter space has way more gray area than the former, which is very black-and-white. This is what GamerGate learned to exploit.
The big lesson of GamerGate was that, by driving conflict in the gray area, we pull focus from the black-and-white of the really bad stuff. The role of the Concerns was never about truth or fairness -- their purpose was to be a distraction that shields far worse harms from attention and criticism. By getting all the good faith people riled up on distractors, we missed the far more important things being done by bad faith actors.
Also, and this is arguably the most significant part of the tactic: by making her look like an aggressor, the hate mob made its actions look defensive -- and therefore more palatable.
This technique is now so embedded in to online discourse that we hardly even realize it's the case. GamerGate normalized it, and it's important to note that it's a tactic, not a partisan thing. We started calling it "cancelling" before that lost all meaning too, but the fingerprints of the tactic are all over what happened to Lindsay Ellis and Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) for example, neither of which were partisan takedowns and were, if anyhing, internal conflicts within one "side" rather than a fight between opposing sides.
If I can frame you in a way that makes it look like you are doing harm to others, I can destroy you with impunity, because people will think you're bad or deserving in the first place, and everyone else will be too busy burning themselves out debating specific minutae in a vast gray area, thereby missing the forest for the trees.
This can, of course, be used in partisan ways. The anti-trans stuff we see on the right is a perfect example of the tactic being utilized. There is an overt hatred campaign against trans people that shields itself with some Very Valid Concerns about children and detransitioning and sports and bathrooms and whatnot. Many of these people want to further the worst possible outcomes (threats, eradication) and rely on the Concerns to paint them and the broader conversation in the best possible light ("we just want sports to be fair!"). We spend our time churning in the gray areas around all of those topics, thinking that we're having valid discourse, while what we're really doing is having our attention pulled away from the people who are actively trying to make it so that trans people don't exist.
This doesn't mean there's not valid conversation to be had. The gray area exists for a reason. The Concerns often do have roots in truth. I have my own criticisms of Sarkeesian, and I'm someone who generally agrees with most of the analysis she gave in her Tropes vs. Women video series.
What it does mean is that when a topic is explicitly linked to hate-based rhetoric, we need to be extremely thoughtful in how we address it and what we say about it, if at all. Paradoxically, I feel it's often better to say nothing about the Concerns in the first place than to engage with them. Commenting on them without directly commenting on the hatred umbrella that covers the topic feels like giving an implicit pass to it. Even if we address the bad directly, it's often not with the same length or intensity as the Concerns. We'll drop a perfunctory anti-hate statement for a single sentence before diving into paragraphs about the specifics of far more minor details. In being willing to spill a lot more ink and effort and pushback over tiny bits of an argument here and there, we're giving a structural, implicit affirmation that the hatred is less important than the Concerns.
Imagine someone coming here, to this topic, right now, who genuinely did make threats against Anita Sarkeesian. Are they met with universal condemnation for their awful actions, or are they met with a conversation that still makes her look like the villain in her own story years later? A big "success" of GamerGate is that the legacy of Anita Sarkeesian still frames her as "someone who did wrong to games/gamers", when, in reality, it's the story of someone who had extreme amounts of wrong done to her while so many passively accepted or turned a blind eye to it.
I thought about jumping into several of the comment threads in this topic before I realized that I was falling into the same trap I did years ago. To be clear: I don't think anyone here is acting in bad faith, but I do think we're all communally living in the Concern gray area, and that has been so poisoned at this point that I don't even know if it's worth inhabiting.
Are we going to ever be able to have a truly meaningful, non-conflict driven discussion about Sarkeesian? Is it even worth doing at this point? Do we gain anything from rehashing years-old talking points and feelings that have calcified into something more solid now that we've sat with them for a long time and forgotten the specifics that once supported them? I'm not sure I'll ever be able to have a conversation about Anita Sarkeesian online that doesn't, in some way, launder the harms done to her, because the whole point of making her a cultural flashpoint in the first place was to allow the hatred against her to escape scrutiny. Any legitimate criticism of her ideas that I could bring feels less significant in comparison.
I don't really have a conclusion other than to say that I see the fingerprints of GamerGate in our conversations here. This topic feels like I'm going back in time. I load up the comments and we're... fighting over Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women videos. And for what? Cultural commentators are a dime-a-dozen now on YouTube and podcasts, but almost none of them get the level of scrutiny that she continues to get from work that she did years ago, which is outright ancient by the standards of the genre. We're holding on to a baggage that we don't need to hold on to, and maybe letting go of that is the best way we can give a goodbye to Feminist Frequency and a fuck you to GamerGate.
To pull Sarkeesian out of this topic then, what do we do moving forward? Not critique lazy/un-scholarly think pieces (or, potentially, outright grift) out of a fear that The Bad People will use...
The big lesson of GamerGate was that, by driving conflict in the gray area, we pull focus from the black-and-white of the really bad stuff. The role of the Concerns was never about truth or fairness -- their purpose was to be a distraction that shields far worse harms from attention and criticism. By getting all the good faith people riled up on distractors, we missed the far more important things being done by bad faith actors.
To pull Sarkeesian out of this topic then, what do we do moving forward? Not critique lazy/un-scholarly think pieces (or, potentially, outright grift) out of a fear that The Bad People will use that critique as a wedge to sneak in their vitriol? That doesn't seem healthy to me. Constantly placate The Good People with "so and so doesn't deserve vitriol, but here's why they're wrong" (which I did repeatedly in this very thread)? That seems exhausting to me. It seems like another classic double bind brought on by Bad People: do nothing and they "win", do something and they still "win".
My only thought (so that I'm contributing beyond asking questions lol) is to try and reframe critique as discussions and not debate, but that tends to get lost the instant someone picks through your response to quote the sections they can rebut and ignore the sections they can't. It's maddening.
Don't let the shitheads into the space. When people no longer feel like everything is a secret ploy to advance a side-agenda they can talk candidly. You can see in the discussion that unfolded...
Exemplary
To pull Sarkeesian out of this topic then, what do we do moving forward? Not critique lazy/un-scholarly think pieces (or, potentially, outright grift) out of a fear that The Bad People will use that critique as a wedge to sneak in their vitriol? That doesn't seem healthy to me. Constantly placate The Good People with "so and so doesn't deserve vitriol, but here's why they're wrong" (which I did repeatedly in this very thread)? That seems exhausting to me. It seems like another classic double bind brought on by Bad People: do nothing and they "win", do something and they still "win".
Don't let the shitheads into the space. When people no longer feel like everything is a secret ploy to advance a side-agenda they can talk candidly.
You can see in the discussion that unfolded here how a lot of the same points were trotted out but with some hindsight it's clear they're very generic sounding. We've all heard them a bajillion times and they're not big deals in the slightest. Outside the environment of Reddit and Twitter where you're being absolutely inundated in related content all rehashing the same things, selectively compiled takedown lists of each and every minor thing you can pull out of context to make the person look bad, etc. people wouldn't even have bought into a lot of those criticisms. It's the volume of opinions with the same tone that magnify individual slights into a constant stream of hostility. But when you look at them without any of the tribalist emotional attachment it's really like "That's it? That's the beef you had that merits raising a ruckus and bringing the point up over and over again in every venue? Instead of just shrugging and moving on?"
It's the dynamics of social media that encourage people to have takes and opinions, even if they're not saying anything new. It's satisfying to participate, in part, because composing those thoughts is a way for people to process what they're seeing for themselves. It's just that nobody needs to be privy to 70,000 people all processing the same narrow slice of input in largely the same way. Once that starts happening it becomes this reinforcing feedback loop where all these different people processing the information makes everyone else think they need to engage too, and then it drives them towards adopting the same take by osmosis as well based on the skewed perspective they're getting from the content stream.
Take away that curation and editorial process and I think a lot of this evaporates. Like on Tildes, I will often type up posts and then delete them. Because the act of typing a comment or response up helps me process my thoughts on a discussion, but then once I reread my post and see it in the context of everything else I realize I'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said. So what am I adding? Sometimes it's useful if I think I'm summarizing multiple streams of ideas from different posters in one place. But for the most part there's no point. There's no karma score so I'm not getting anything for it. Nobody will even remember me saying yet another iteration of the same thoughts as 40 others in the thread. So why put myself out? This is the healthier sort of interaction that happens when the site isn't trying to elicit engagement out of you.
Editing note: I noticed I have a bad habit of using the word "just" way too much in my writing, but anytime someone "exemplaries" one of my posts I feel the need to go back and fix things like that so I don't cringe if it comes up again.
Well said. But to put it in simpler terms, which is how I tend to think about it in my own head: Is my personal opinion on this subject really worth sharing? Am I actually informed enough on this...
Well said. But to put it in simpler terms, which is how I tend to think about it in my own head:
Is my personal opinion on this subject really worth sharing?
Am I actually informed enough on this subject to even justify me holding a strong opinion, let alone one worth defending against people who might strongly disagree with it?
Would voicing my opinion on the subject actually make a positive difference in this community, or would it only contribute to things worsening for everyone?
Is the subject being discussed itself even really that important in the grand scheme of things, and worth debating over, and potentially having heated arguments about?
I constantly find myself asking those questions to myself, especially on contentious topics where even a good faith effort by me to share my opinion might still only result in more fuel being added to the fire.
And more often than not, especially these days, I find myself realizing that simply choosing not to make a comment is the wiser course of action... and so I instead typically just wait for someone smarter, more informed, more well reasoned, and/or more eloquent (like @kfwyre, and yourself, NaraVara) to write a better comment than I ever could on the subject. And when I see such a comment I can then just try to support it with my own reply to them, building on what they already have touched on, or even just by giving them an Exemplary for their effort.
cc: @johansolo, since I think my comment addresses some of your own questions as well.
It definitely did and I appreciate it. I don't have the time right now to devote to a longer response but I wanted to take the quick second to let you and @kfwyre know of my appreciation.
cc: @johansolo, since I think my comment addresses some of your own questions as well.
It definitely did and I appreciate it. I don't have the time right now to devote to a longer response but I wanted to take the quick second to let you and @kfwyre know of my appreciation.
Sadly if I thought like this in my own cynical mind, I would never comment here. I feel I may have taken the old 4chan mentality of "lurk moar" a bit too closely to heart, and that made me scared...
Is my personal opinion on this subject really worth sharing?
Sadly if I thought like this in my own cynical mind, I would never comment here. I feel I may have taken the old 4chan mentality of "lurk moar" a bit too closely to heart, and that made me scared to comment anywhere for the longest time.
That's understandable. Maybe you could use a more forgiving version: is my personal opinion on this subject really the best contribution I can make to this debate?.
That's understandable. Maybe you could use a more forgiving version: is my personal opinion on this subject really the best contribution I can make to this debate?.
I think what you say about commenting as a way to process things yourself is a really good point. And to go a bit further, I think sometimes people want to voice how they feel rather than...
I think what you say about commenting as a way to process things yourself is a really good point. And to go a bit further, I think sometimes people want to voice how they feel rather than something more objective. And it's done in part as a way to process their own feelings through commentary, but in a way it's also done to give them a tautologically true basis to stand on.
People just want to have a thing they can say and be by default correct about it, so they don't have to feel insecure about whether what they said was wrong. So they'll talk about their opinions, because reporting what your opinions are is something you can always be right about.
And so what will happen is someone will say one thing, and another person will respond to rebutt it. And the first person will fall back and defend that it WAS indeed their opinion, while the second person will be trying to argue the broader context.
But as you say, commenting is in part processing. So to the first person, sometimes they're not deflecting. Sometimes they really are just trying to talk about their feelings and get into conflict with people trying to argue the context.
And sometimes they ARE deflecting, and they're just trying to avoid having to say they were wrong.
And it can be hard to advocate for the former without also accidentally facilitating the latter.
I think this is probably why I find I get better discussion in private Discords than I do in public commentary sections. The shitheads aren't allowed in. And since they are leftist Discords,...
Just don't let the shitheads into the space. When people no longer feel like everything is a secret ploy to advance a side-agenda they can just talk candidly.
I think this is probably why I find I get better discussion in private Discords than I do in public commentary sections. The shitheads aren't allowed in. And since they are leftist Discords, there's still just as much disagreement and animosity!
I appreciate that you watched me open a giant can of worms and then politely handed me another and asked if I could open that one too. 😆 Those are good questions, and I honestly don't know if I...
Exemplary
To pull Sarkeesian out of this topic then, what do we do moving forward? Not critique lazy/un-scholarly think pieces (or, potentially, outright grift) out of a fear that The Bad People will use that critique as a wedge to sneak in their vitriol?
I appreciate that you watched me open a giant can of worms and then politely handed me another and asked if I could open that one too. 😆
Those are good questions, and I honestly don't know if I can give an adequate answer. I think it's way easier for me to pick something apart than it is for me to build a solution instead, and while I've identified what I think the problem is, I genuinely don't know the solution.
To bring Sarkeesian back into it for a moment: I genuinely don't believe her critiques were lazy, un-scholarly, or that she was grifting in the first place. I honestly think the widespread impression that people have of her as such is a product of GamerGate pushing bad talking points and people looking for chances to actively disinterpret her work rather than affording it the principle of charity.
This is where the double bind you bring up comes into play, because many people of course don't share my beliefs on that and thus think I'm a sucker and she's taking me to the cleaners (not that I actually got the chance to state my case against that much, if ever, because I quickly exited all online gaming conversations and spaces once the full force of GamerGate hit). Nevertheless, I'm well aware that, from others' perspective, my willingness to give her validity is allowing a Bad Person to win with Bad Tactics, in the same way I feel about giving GamerGaters their passes for hate. It makes for a nice-looking symmetry, with an internal logic on both sides that can justify itself, but I feel that's illusory.
In the time I've been on Tildes, I've thought a lot about online conflict, and the concept I keep coming back to is "proportionality". I want to use the word "harmony", but that's got a default positive connotation that makes my attempt at crystallizing the topic outright misleading. By "proportionality", I mean having personal responses to things that are in accordance with the intensity of their antecedents (if there is a better word for this or something already established from like, psychology, let me know!). I think online platforms and social media and a lot of the emergent norms that have been established are aimed at making us lose our sense of proportionality.
To bring Sarkeesian back into it for a moment: what is the absolute worst thing she did? For the purposes of this, let's also frame her in the worst possible light: she is someone in the entertainment industry doing some trend-chasing for money -- basically, an influencer before we called them "influencers". Additionally, you could argue that her series is a type of gender discrimination. Neither of these are my genuine stance, but this isn't about me -- it's about the people who really don't like her.
From what I saw, many if not most of those people who didn't like her didn't meet the situation with proportionality. She was villainized and demonized in a way that was far out of scope with her actions. Also, there was a corresponding counterbalance of underreaction to the people doing actual harms: they benefitted from an inverted proportionality that didn't villanize or demonize them nearly enough.
Zooming back out, it looks like modern, (mostly) online culture war conflict knows that proportionality is malleable and uses that to its advantage. Maximize surface area on your target by framing them in the worst possible way. As soon as someone is in the crosshairs, every action they've ever taken and word they've ever said become "fair game" to use against them. Also, the more "evidence" you can compile (or fabricate) against them, the more you make it look like the anger, outrage, and hatred against them is, in fact, proportional.
A way I've been thinking about this is a -100 to +100 scale. Let's call it a spectrum of "intensity", with negative numbers being a sort of "negative intensity" (anger, frustration, etc.) and positive ones being a sort of "positive intensity" (delight, joy, etc.).
Now, let's look at a genuinely Very Bad Person: say, Harvey Weinstein. He is someone who is probably at the negative end of the scale for most. It's hard to put a specific number, but he probably lives in the -90s for many. Not only were his actions unconscionable, but they persisted for a long time and affected many people.
Now let's go back to Sarkeesian. Even for people who dislike her and her points, it's hard to argue that she should be that far down the negative scale. A proportional response would have her at -10, maybe -30 at most?
Of course, we know that wasn't the case. She was put at -100 by many, and I don't think this is specific to just her. I think it's actually a product of online discourse, which seems to have effectively gutted the entire middle of the scale (including 0, no response or a neutral one). People tend to get compressed into either -100 or +100, good or bad, right or wrong, etc.
This flattening is part of what makes the stuff I talked about in my original comment work. By compressing all of "bad" into the -100 slot, someone like Sarkeesian and someone like Weinstein look comparable, and, thus, the social response to each looks proportional in accordance. This is why so many were willing to overlook the threats in the first place.
It also works within topics. It's easy to look at Sarkeesian and GamerGaters and have a -100 response to both. They're both bad! They're both deserving of scorn and hatred! This, I believe, is another loss of proportionality. By a non-gutted standard, the actions of the GamerGaters should land far more down the negative scale even if we assume the worst about Sarkeesian, which is why they worked so hard to shift perceptions against her and, therefore, in their favor.
It finally has an effect on people like you and I. I can't speak for you, of course, but if I were to guess, your perception of Sarkeesian likely falls on the negative side of the scale, while mine falls on the positive. It would be trivially easy for us to shove the other to the extreme (and I think wider internet norms outright encourage this). You might be inclined to project a +100 score on me relative to Sarkeesian, which from your perspective might make me seem like an unthinking defender of her -- an easy mark for an obvious con artist. Likewise, I might project a -100 score onto you, seeing you as nothing more than another internet misogynist who got sold lies by a hate mob.
This is, of course not what I'm saying either you or I are. But, if we were to start to engage in conversation about her, the perception of opposition and the removal of any "middle" is much more likely to drive conflict between us than understanding. I think it's common on the internet to sort of automatically assume this stance in ourselves and others, and it's what leads to nitpicky back-and-forths and protracted arguments. It sets us up for, as you identified, debate rather than discussion.
I also think a lot of this is subconscious. When I first got on Tildes, I had to do a lot of "unlearning" of bad habits. I'm probably still doing that in ways I won't be aware of until later. I would see someone make a comment about something and immediately project a ton of baggage onto their comment and, thus, their identity. There are users here who I genuinely didn't like from our first interactions or after seeing some of their original comments.
Prior to our big user influx, Tildes was in "cozy mode" and so everyone saw the same set of users across the site over time. Some of those users who I'd originally pegged as people I didn't like are now some of my favorite users on the site, and I was able to change my mind on that because I got to see their human complexity over time. I'd shoved them into a -100 spot initially, based on almost no actual evidence -- just a gut feeling and some associations -- but now they've shifted over to something solidly on the positive side for me. I can even go back to some of those original comments I didn't like and see that they were coming from a different place than I assumed or, alternately, those individuals have grown out of or past those original ideas or comments. What they said five years ago isn't reflective of who they are or what they believe today.
I say all of this because I think it gives the context to swing back around to your original question: what do we do?
My thoughts are the following (and please keep in mind this is more of a scattershot of thoughts than an actual prescription or solution):
Attend to proportionality in ourselves.
Very few things are at the -100 or +100 end of the scale. Most things are more in the middle. Also, it's an oversimplification of my own that we can even condense things down to a single number (ever feel conflicted about something -- both positive and negative at the same time?). Nevertheless, it's been helpful for me as a simple heuristic. "What's the number on this?" It helps me mitigate my own feelings and thoughts on an internet that's constantly trying to stoke outrage and anger.
The internet and social media want me at the ends of the scale, living in high-arousal emotions. There's a vast space in between those, each with its own feelings and colors and texture. Having a bit of a meta-narrative in my own head about my own proportionality has helped me better navigate different topics and even things like the daily news. It's not that I'm attempting to control my own feelings on things, but more that I'm attempting to evaluate my responses to those feelings -- is this something worth acting on? If so, how so? Before I commented my original post on this topic, I had a very negative response to this whole thing here in general. I almost jumped in, feeling that -80 feeling, and started arguing with people. It took a lot of me sorting things out before I figured out what I wanted to say, part of which was that I don't want to be the kind of person who jumps into conversations at a -80 in the first place.
Attend to proportionality in others.
One of the ways I choose to identify who to engage with is by assessing their own proportionality relative to a topic. If I thought you were a diehard GamerGater -- a -100 on Sarkeesian -- I never would have responded, and certainly not in such length. I see what I consider some disproportionality in you (and you likely see the same in me!), but I also believe that we're likely closer on the scale than we are farther away. That makes me want to talk to someone like you, rather than dismiss you out of hand.
If I had, as previously mentioned, jumped in to the conversation at my personal -80 with regards to the ongoing conversations here, I don't think things would have gone well for either of us. We likely would have started arguing, both hit our -100 intensities, and both walked away angrier than we were when we started. It's hard to "read the room" online, but I try to leave people be who are at that negative extreme, both for themselves and myself. If I do engage with someone, I try to aim for something closer to zero -- an attempt at bringing the intensity back down. I'm hoping, in writing this to you, that it comes across as a softening of the topic, not a sharpening of it. I often write long things here and get the impression that people feel kind of blindsided by them (and in some cases in the past, I've definitely written some high-intensity blindsides), but my intent is the opposite -- a low-intensity exploration that (hopefully) offers a lot to chew on.
Keeping a lower intensity can be tough when duty calls, but I often believe that saying nothing is better than keeping a conflict going, especially because most online back-and-forths quickly lose proportionality to the topic being debated. Ever see people viscerally angry about something like, I don't know, the proper way to hang a toilet paper roll? It's such an inconsequential thing, as close to 0 as you can get on the intensity scale, but a debate about it can drive everyone to -100 really quick. I try to identify situations like that and stay out of them for everyone's sake, myself included.
Allow others their complexity.
People are complicated. People are messy. People grow and change over time. A lot of the issues we see online come from people not allowing and understanding this in others. Someone was wrong about something? Okay, they were wrong. If they were wrong in good faith, then it was a mistake. Let them learn and grow from it. I want that leeway from others, but that also means I need to offer it to them.
Too often we get into really infantilizing situations where we assume the other person is a caricature of an individual without any depth to their feelings or experiences. I'm a believer in the idea that, if you ever want to have a good conversation with someone, then you have to dive into their personal complexity relative to a topic. It's why I find most "rational" or fact-based arguments online thoroughly uncompelling (especially because those are often just exercises in cherry-picking).
Diving into why someone believes something and what it means to them is more likely to foster understanding than any rebuttal ever will. Like, I genuinely want to know why people hate Anita Sarkeesian so much, and I also wish they would be willing to listen to my perspective on why I genuinely like her. It is very rare that we allow one another this complexity though, especially when we're standing on opposite sides of an issue, and especially when the issue is linked to a wider culture war.
Bad faith actors will try to exploit all of these.
There is no skeleton key or magic bullet that will magically, structurally prevent bad faith actors from poisoning the well. Every adaptation we make they will try to work around. That's what acting in bad faith is: penetration testing for social systems. If we block one avenue for access, they will try to find another one. Everything I've proposed here can and will be used by bad faith actors in disingenuous ways.
We can't necessarily fight them so much as we can be aware of it. If we try to lock things down to make them "bad faith-proof" then we do a lot of damage to good faith conversation. Meanwhile, if we take off the guardrails completely, then we give them too much leeway.
With the influx of recent users, I have seen a few that I believed to be acting in bad faith. I'm happy to report that they have ended up banned. It's hard, because I never saw any of them fully cross a clear line, but it was more of an accumulation of comments from them that gradually revealed their intent. Continually making other people's experiences worse is ban-worthy on Tildes, and I think that's the right call and way to deal with bad faith commenters. If we allow them to persist, they will erode the quality of discussion here by exhausting people and refusing reciprocity.
A ban is a social consequence that falls on their shoulders, rather than a consequence that gets distributed throughout the community (e.g. erosion of discourse, a buildup of anger or frustration, etc.). I think it's important to shield good faith commenters from the effects of bad faith ones, and bans ensure that the bad faith actors are the ones receiving the negativity of their actions.
It sounds dismissive, but ultimately I hope bad faith actors learn from their experiences and change their ways. They're people too, and they're often young and misled, as I think a lot of people swept up in GamerGate were. It's not that I never want to see them on Tildes again -- it's that, until they're able to meet and uphold our social contract, I want them to be the ones facing the consequences for their actions rather than having everyone else subsidizing that.
Popping out of slumber to just say thank you for doing this, it's one of the many, nearly uncountable reasons that I value your opinion and your presence. Unfortunately the exact opposite of this...
I can even go back to some of those original comments I didn't like and see that they were coming from a different place than I assumed or, alternately, those individuals have grown out of or past those original ideas or comments. What they said five years ago isn't reflective of who they are or what they believe today.
Popping out of slumber to just say thank you for doing this, it's one of the many, nearly uncountable reasons that I value your opinion and your presence. Unfortunately the exact opposite of this behavior is one of the many reasons I felt unwelcome on this website, and even in the time I've been mostly absent I've run across people still talking about myself and others I've known in a negative light which shows a persistent strong negative opinion which was unwilling to budge, or a desire to win gotcha points by appealing to the hivemind perspective on an issue (or simply just the perspective showing up in the comments at the right time).
Ever see people viscerally angry about something like, I don't know, the proper way to hang a toilet paper roll?
You know I've noticed that some of these discussions have really died out over time, as in if culturally we've moved on from caring about whether people pronounce it gif or gif, or whether they like pineapple on their pizza. I think the internet and humanity as a whole are slowly learning how to operate in larger public spaces and I wanted to quickly reflect on how uplifting and wholesome and awesome that is! These discussions and little fights do happen occasionally and way out of proportion, but we did kinda collectively move on from being pedants about grammar with each other and other disproportional arguments on many issues.
I think issues like gamergate highlight how this disproportionality can be difficult and different for every person. If you're a woman working in gaming, you probably have a real reason to be more highly invested than someone with less intersectional identities in common with the bad behavior being called out. In Kenji Yoshino's book Say the Right Thing he presents a really simple methodology he calls the stoplight method to address and simplify this. There's some good examples in the book where he contrasts how some things may feel like an issue of policy to some, but humanity to others based on how close they are to the groups being affected. Highly recommend the book, by the way, if you haven't read it yet. 😄
This is a point I think about a lot. Over the past few generations we’ve scaled up the amount of information a person knew about the world and the number of people they interact with dramatically....
I think the internet and humanity as a whole are slowly learning how to operate in larger public spaces and I wanted to quickly reflect on how uplifting and wholesome and awesome that is!
This is a point I think about a lot. Over the past few generations we’ve scaled up the amount of information a person knew about the world and the number of people they interact with dramatically. We regularly interact in public spaces frequented by cities and regions worth of people and it takes a while to understand that sense of scale. If 10,000 people in your town believed the moon was fake you’d be really worried about what was happening. If 10,000 people on the internet believe the moon was fake they just have a Discord somewhere and randomly pop up to get into arguments with people who are now really worried about what’s happening.
The examples you give are small but really hopeful ways in which we’re learning to understand that the world is a REALLY big and diverse place and you’re now regularly interacting with parts of it that think about thinks in totally different ways than you. I wanted to join you in thinking that this is a great sign!
I saved up my exemplary to drop on your top level comment, and then you come out with this tour de force. People like you are why I joined this site. :)
I saved up my exemplary to drop on your top level comment, and then you come out with this tour de force. People like you are why I joined this site. :)
What can I say except... you're welcome! EDIT: Also if this were Reddit I would give your response gold, but it's not, so you get this comment instead.
I appreciate that you watched me open a giant can of worms and then politely handed me another and asked if I could open that one too. 😆
What can I say except... you're welcome!
EDIT: Also if this were Reddit I would give your response gold, but it's not, so you get this comment instead.
Tildes doesn't have Gold, but it does have the Exemplary label, which is quite similar in effect... only it's free to use every 8 hours, and you can also add a personalized message to the...
Tildes doesn't have Gold, but it does have the Exemplary label, which is quite similar in effect... only it's free to use every 8 hours, and you can also add a personalized message to the recipient when you apply that label to their comment.
You have been here for more than 7 days, so labels should be unlocked for you now. Just click 'Label' at the bottom of the comment, and you can then apply them when appropriate... (like giving an Exemplary to kfwyre's above comment to show your appreciation for it, *hint hint* ;)
If I may suggest something, I would say that it's important to be aware of the tone of the conversation and whether or not it meets your standards for nuanced and thoughtful discussion. Others in...
If I may suggest something, I would say that it's important to be aware of the tone of the conversation and whether or not it meets your standards for nuanced and thoughtful discussion. Others in this thread have stated that repeating and rehashing the same points over and over again in a sort of one-sided, reductive manner is a pretense to dismiss Anita Sarkeesian's work wholesale, giving leeway to to attack her personally. Instead of discussing the topic (the tropes of how women are depicted in video games), there becomes a huge focus on how she did her work—to an extent that was far overblown since everything else in these videos becomes completely ignored.
If we are aware that a discussion has become unproductive and that a participant's intention is to attack a person and not discuss the topic at hand, then I think it becomes important for us to introduce those nuances ourselves. It doesn't mean that we have to take a "side" and ignore the valid criticisms. It simply means directing the conversation to examine the work and topic as a whole.
For example, based on the repeated talking points around the very short clip of Hitman, I would have assumed that that was the entirety of the video. If we take the pulse of the conversation, we can determine that these talking points neither need to be rehashed again nor contribute to a productive conversation. It's up to us to introduce other aspects and have the discussion we actually want to have.
but that tends to get lost the instant someone picks through your response to quote the sections they can rebut and ignore the sections they can't. It's maddening.
Honestly, there are some people that you simply can't have conversations with :\ There's only so much we can do as individuals. But I think @kfwyre's point is rather to point out that it is easy to mindlessly normalize the framing of bad faith actors. We have a responsibility to be constantly aware of the tone and goal of the conversation.
Just noting down my thoughts / questions here after skimming, bc sleep is not optional: Why though? Why do we have to rehash these discussions? Ad hoc hypothesis: because the topic was so insanely...
I don't really have a conclusion other than to say that I see the fingerprints of GamerGate in our conversations here. This topic feels like I'm going back in time. I load up the comments and we're... fighting over Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women videos.
Just noting down my thoughts / questions here after skimming, bc sleep is not optional:
Why though? Why do we have to rehash these discussions? Ad hoc hypothesis: because the topic was so insanely politicized, that rational discussion about it was impossible online, while irrational discussion of it was everywhere. People have rational thoughts about it, and rational counterpoints to irrational arguments of others, and they want to see it to it's conclusion. For 10 years now it was basically impossible to resolve this internal conflict in discussion with others. It was impossible to state an opinion that sees both good and bad in her work, and have it discussed in good faith. That energy needs to go somewhere, and perhaps for some it still didn't have the chance to.
I have a much simpler reason for you. It's because these conversations never had closure. It's still painful to people. It's not just one thing, either; it's a bunch of related issues that...
I have a much simpler reason for you. It's because these conversations never had closure. It's still painful to people. It's not just one thing, either; it's a bunch of related issues that continually drown eachother out. It has become this big amorphous blob that you can't help but get some of it stuck to you no matter what you do with it.
It's also why I gave up on critiquing games journalism. Of all things, Scott Alexander broke me of this insistence to do good with this quote: welp, I was this metaphorical principle civil...
This is what I was interested in talking about back when Tropes vs. Women came out. I wanted to look at the critique, pull apart and examine it, think through it thoughtfully, discuss it with others. I quickly found this was nearly impossible to do with any fidelity though, because of the context in which her work got put.
It's also why I gave up on critiquing games journalism. Of all things, Scott Alexander broke me of this insistence to do good with this quote:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
welp, I was this metaphorical principle civil libertarian and I saw the seven zillion witches firsthand. There's no point, and there was no reason to bother. I still have anger of the Germsmann controversy (something probably older than many o the people who cry "ethics in games jounalism"), I still hate how metacritic scores have so much weight in conversation, up to tying employee bonueses to it. But I am but a single person and the well has been poisoned. So I just moved on and stopped talking about it, and started cultivating youtubers, even if I 1000x prefer a written format for news over video. I have exactly one news website I follow these days, I get the rest from social media and youtubers.
It's a real shame because in one of my potentially hottest takes: I think it was absolutely genius how Gamergate managed to pull off a social media campaign in 2015 or something that lead to ads pulling out of various websites. And I'm disappointed that that is the ONLY example I can think of where this sort of campaign succeeded. It could partially be because GG changed how advertisers re-evaulate consumer feedback, but it sure feels more like a lack of trying. A bunch of angry gamers could get funding pulled when a video game writer badmouths them, but the larger populace can barely de-fund some of the biggest snake oil saleman out there. Again, a shame.
These are the real examples of real abuses. Luckily we got Giant Bomb out of it, for however long that lasted, and Obsidian seems to be in a good place these days and pretty beloved. People still...
I still have anger of the Germsmann controversy (something probably older than many o the people who cry "ethics in games jounalism"), I still hate how metacritic scores have so much weight in conversation, up to tying employee bonueses to it.
These are the real examples of real abuses. Luckily we got Giant Bomb out of it, for however long that lasted, and Obsidian seems to be in a good place these days and pretty beloved. People still make New Vegas analysis video essays which is something few games can boast. The metacritic thing is why I seek out reviewers who refuse to numerically score anything.
Good for her to have the foresight and self awareness to know she’s exhausted and burnt out and that she needs to take a step back. I’ve seen many content creators burn out from the immense...
Good for her to have the foresight and self awareness to know she’s exhausted and burnt out and that she needs to take a step back.
I’ve seen many content creators burn out from the immense pressure of a big audience and delivering content on a less than forgiving schedule. I can only imagine what it’s like to have that and have gone through Gamergate.
I hope she gets the rest and relaxation she needs and deserves.
Burnt out might be a huge understatement. I don't hesitate to say Anita was one of the most hated people online at one point. I would know, when I was in my late teens I used to be part of the...
Burnt out might be a huge understatement. I don't hesitate to say Anita was one of the most hated people online at one point. I would know, when I was in my late teens I used to be part of the whole gamergate movement before I smartened up and left the toxicity behind. Anita had such a huge target on her back. Bringing up her name in any discussion would automatically bring people hating on her in the replies no matter where you were. I'm honestly amazed she kept going this long and I have a lot of respect for it. Hopefully we're in a better place today thanks to her efforts.
For anyone unfamiliar or even too young at this point, here's a short overview from Innuendo Studios on why she was so hated: https://youtu.be/6y8XgGhXkTQ?si=_TMiLYc3l1lxFaTu The alt-right as it...
The alt-right as it exists today (and its various incarnations over the past decade) has gotten a lot of "juice" from trading on hatred of her. If you're familiar with "breadtube" or left-leaning YouTube, there's tons of interesting takes on how the internet responded to her and how GamerGate was animated as a malicious force.
I just watched the video series, thanks for the link I was struck by how much similarity there has been between gamergate and some of the newer antagonistic social media movements in the U.S....
I just watched the video series, thanks for the link
I was struck by how much similarity there has been between gamergate and some of the newer antagonistic social media movements in the U.S. (e.g. COVID denialism, presidential election denialism, and most recently the "anti-woke" movement). In particular, his 4th video that discussed how the abhorrent, 4chan crowd hid within and had a symbiotic relationship with the larger "Angry Jack" crowd.
Steve Bannon was pushing gamergate articles at Breitbart and used the same tactics on the Trump campaign. You’re totally right to see parallels here. It’s a lot of the same people.
Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios has covered the history and rhetoric of right-wing thought on the internet over the years in a very approachable way. The second series he did (which is still...
Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios has covered the history and rhetoric of right-wing thought on the internet over the years in a very approachable way. The second series he did (which is still ongoing) is called The Alt-Right Playbook and starts here: https://youtu.be/4xGawJIseNY?si=GxKw3Q4AVl9QV5c-
Some of the videos are rather lengthy so it's not something you'd probably binge in one sitting. But anyway, you're right, there's absolutely a connecting thread between the various incarnations of ultraconservative or right-wing movements online at least in the US.
I straight-up lost friends during that whole thing. I was afraid to click on the link to this discussion to be honest, even on Tildes, because I remember what it was like then and was afraid it...
I straight-up lost friends during that whole thing. I was afraid to click on the link to this discussion to be honest, even on Tildes, because I remember what it was like then and was afraid it would still be like that now. It was a really unsettling time to be a gamer and a girl, toxic only begins to describe it - it was dangerous.
I had people threatening me because I said I didn't get what all the backlash was about. She got death threats and seriously detailed descriptions of acts of violence thrown at her - she was like a lightning rod for frustrated, angry boys and men, and anyone who commented on anything close to her without matching their level of hatred got zapped along with her. "Well ackshually it's about ethics in video games" - well actually, it was a symptom of the hatred, fear, and intense desire for community that has informed and empowered alt-right hate groups and violence today. I'm glad that age and experience have smartened you up, and I hope you can pass that wisdom along to people in your circle of influence when you see hatred and toxicity in your day-to-day life.
Tropes was also very intro 101-level content. The followups people went to were what became “breadtube” and everything that’s happened after that. They had a podcast I used to listen to but it was...
Tropes was also very intro 101-level content. The followups people went to were what became “breadtube” and everything that’s happened after that. They had a podcast I used to listen to but it was nothing particularly special in a media criticism land that was becoming increasingly crowded.
It’s crazy to think all the GamerGate stuff happened a decade ago. It was terrifying as I was following a lot of the key players on social media from indie game podcasts/forums and seeing people have to run from their houses from 8chan/KiA trolls.
I’m not surprised she’s taking a break and she’s earned it. Go figure out the next chapter.
Part of this is because they pivoted into podcasts which often don't do well on the platform. FF's active viewership on YouTube is comparable to BehindTheBastards for example.
Her Youtube channel has 213k subscribers and been stuck at around 3000 views per video for years, that's very small fish in the world of Youtube.
Part of this is because they pivoted into podcasts which often don't do well on the platform. FF's active viewership on YouTube is comparable to BehindTheBastards for example.
I’d consider 200,000 people who want to hear what you have to say a pretty big audience. Sure there are people with bigger subscriber counts, but that’s still a lot of people.
I’d consider 200,000 people who want to hear what you have to say a pretty big audience.
Sure there are people with bigger subscriber counts, but that’s still a lot of people.
It's more about the views than the members. It's the same issue that large but dead subreddits get where they have a lot of subs, but people have all but left, simply never choosing/remembering to...
It's more about the views than the members. It's the same issue that large but dead subreddits get where they have a lot of subs, but people have all but left, simply never choosing/remembering to unsubscribe.
200k subs with 3k views per new video premiere (<24 hours) is basically dead. a rapidly growing channel should have roughly 1:1 views to subscribers until 100k subs or so (assuming we're talking about edited videos, not stream archive), a channel at 200k subs should have at the bare minimum 20k views on a week old video.
That's a lot of people but isn't anything but a number for "I think this is neat" if it doesn't translate into views. Which is yeah is relatively successful but maybe that doesn't mean it should...
That's a lot of people but isn't anything but a number for "I think this is neat" if it doesn't translate into views.
Which is yeah is relatively successful but maybe that doesn't mean it should be your fulltime job.
I don't think it's typical at all, I looked through a few of the content creators that I follow and have similar subscriber counts and most of their videos at least broke 100K and many of the...
I don't think it's typical at all, I looked through a few of the content creators that I follow and have similar subscriber counts and most of their videos at least broke 100K and many of the videos far exceeded the subscriber count
Either she wasn't playing the game with the YT algorithm or her channel was shadowbanned because her videos were not being promoted
It's because it became a podcast channel with little visual flare. That's fine and all, but YT audiences don't respond well to that format. As counter example, Pod Save America at least video...
It's because it became a podcast channel with little visual flare. That's fine and all, but YT audiences don't respond well to that format. As counter example, Pod Save America at least video records their sessions (and does little clip inserts and stuff) so you can watch the podcast on YT if you want seeing real people versus just listening. Very few channels can get away with having a still frame for the majority of their runtime.
I never really watched her show, but I do remember when she was raising money for it and my word what a horrible time to be a woman on the internet. It really was bad out there, especially in...
I never really watched her show, but I do remember when she was raising money for it and my word what a horrible time to be a woman on the internet. It really was bad out there, especially in gaming culture, and starting a show like that to respond to it at that time, in that space... I'll just say that I certainly couldn't've put myself out there like that. Absolutely no way.
On top of that, there were so many response videos and crypieces with thesis statements that could generally be summed up as "sexism is over: are women still whining about it because they're stupid, crazy, or manipulative?" with literally zero sense of self-awareness. So not only would we get harassed/insulted/abused, having the temerity to talk about the facts of our negative experiences would be used as fodder for more hostility.
I might go back and check a bit of the backlog, but honestly that period of time was so awful that I'm genuinely not sure if I could revisit it without getting at least a little upset. Even if the content is relatively anodyne, the context it started in was for sure not.
Honestly I'm surprised she lasted as long as she did.
"X is over, so why doesn't Y fucking shut up about it?!" Is the cornerstone of modern conservative thought, as someone who lives in a very Red state. Literally last night at my job I had a...
"X is over, so why doesn't Y fucking shut up about it?!" Is the cornerstone of modern conservative thought, as someone who lives in a very Red state.
Literally last night at my job I had a conversation with someone who felt like black people are more racist than white people because he doesn't like the black guy at his job.
Because formal discrimination through laws and written policies is now illegal, these people believe racism, racial violence and discrimination have disappeared.
Because formal discrimination through laws and written policies is now illegal, these people believe racism, racial violence and discrimination have disappeared.
People treat it like ancient history or something when Ruby Bridges is still alive and 68 and she had to be escorted by the U.S. Marshals to get to school as a little girl for her safety.
Anecdotally, I know an interracial couple who had rocks thrown at them for holding hands in public. It's an extreme example but some people are hateful. Also Elon invited the nazis and hate...
Anecdotally, I know an interracial couple who had rocks thrown at them for holding hands in public. It's an extreme example but some people are hateful. Also Elon invited the nazis and hate mongers back onto twitter/x and they are very publicly recruiting and expressing their views right now.
It's always been the way a portion of the population feel about things. Socrates lamented youngsters being rude, and for ignoring their elders. There is plenty of written history from any given...
It's always been the way a portion of the population feel about things.
Socrates lamented youngsters being rude, and for ignoring their elders.
There is plenty of written history from any given age, modern or historical, that shows people voicing this kind of attitude.
For me, that only makes me relax and remember that those voices will always be there. Life has moved forwards still. Always has, always will.
Just as surely as those opinions will exist, so will the voices that want change and betterment. The majority just plodding along will also be here. I take great comfort in that.
Assuming you're referencing that one quote that everyone does, it's not actually from Socrates. In fact, Socrates was put to death specifically based on charges of inciting youngsters into being...
Socrates lamented youngsters being rude, and for ignoring their elders.
In fact, Socrates was put to death specifically based on charges of inciting youngsters into being rude, impious, and for disrespecting their elders and the customs of the polis.
And, in the defense of the oldsters in Socrates' day who probably did harbor such complaints, the generation they'd have been complaining about would have been responsible for tearing Greek civilization apart in the Peloponnesian war and presiding over the erosion of Athenian democracy. So maybe they were onto something in the same way the Greatest Generation could have been onto something when they whined about the Baby Boomers.
Since the last descending opinion was nuked I will add my two cents. The way this woman was treated was truely horrible, that said it is exactly the kind of response she was looking for. She is...
Exemplary
Since the last descending opinion was nuked I will add my two cents. The way this woman was treated was truely horrible, that said it is exactly the kind of response she was looking for. She is basically an Alex Jones type but for the left, she does not have the insight or knowledge of someone such as ContraPoints.
The ideas of her essays had merit, but were so painfully executed in such an obvious bias and reaching manner which is why she received the angry backlash she got. Does this justify the extreme reactions she received? No, but the polarization that was created was created because people that had real problems with the critique were lumped into the same group as the bigots and treated like shit for having an informed opinion. It became a topic you could not discuss just like the Last Jedi or The Last of Us pt.2.
In the end her contributions actually lead to less critique and less discussion, not necessarily intentional but that is the truth of the matter as I see it.
But in the end that is just my opinion.
Edit: Holy shit, you compare one poorly informed talking head to another and people lose there minds. Let me make this clear, Alex Jones is a much worse human being compare to Anita Sarkeesian. The similarities between the two are that they are both lightning rods of hate and defense, to the point that the majority of responses are people being offended on her behalf. With very few people actually wanting to have a discussion about her work. Which basically proves my point.
Do her ideas have merit but poorly executed, or is she an Alex Jones? These two seem mutually exclusive to me, as I can't think of a topic where Alex Jones has had reasonable ideas. Did she...
Do her ideas have merit but poorly executed, or is she an Alex Jones? These two seem mutually exclusive to me, as I can't think of a topic where Alex Jones has had reasonable ideas.
Did she receive angry backlash solely because she articulated her ideas poorly, or because she poked the bear of critiquing gender in games, a genre long perceived as a bastion of maleness? I find it difficult to believe this ballooned into the huge dramatic issue that it did over a misunderstanding about well-intentioned critics being lumped in with a minority of malicious actors. Maybe there was valid criticism to be had, but there always seems to be an awful lot of criticism of her as a person and not so much focus on her ideas whenever the topic comes up, and that speaks volumes.
The way this woman was treated was truely horrible, that said it is exactly the kind of response she was looking for.
As an aside, do you really believe she was looking for the horrible treatment she received? Why would anyone want that?
I use Alex Jones as an example of someone spouting poorly constructed and informed opinions and refusing to have any self reflection. I would never equate the opinions she holds to the truly...
I use Alex Jones as an example of someone spouting poorly constructed and informed opinions and refusing to have any self reflection. I would never equate the opinions she holds to the truly despicable things he says. Honestly the right is so much worse then the left that it is hard to find someone that would equal Alex Jones in hatred.
As for the discourse around her, the reaction to my post kind of proves my point. If the opinion I stated had been about anyone else, I would not have to defend it to such an extent because it is such a tame opinion all things considered. But the discourse around this topic has turned so us vs them that if I look to be even an inch out of step I am presumed to be a monster instead of a individual with their own personal view of the situation.
And as for your question, I am speaking of validation. The negative and frankly bigoted reaction she got makes her feel justified in her view even though it was very poorly constructed. Again, this is the problem instead of talking about her actual work we talk about the discourse around her. No one has even asked about what in her work I dislike.
You're lamenting how it's impossible to discuss her work without it devolving into a meta-discussion about her. If you actually wanted that though, I'd have expected you to actually volunteer the...
No one has even asked about what in her work I dislike.
You're lamenting how it's impossible to discuss her work without it devolving into a meta-discussion about her. If you actually wanted that though, I'd have expected you to actually volunteer the constructive and specific critiques of her work up front without needing to be asked. Instead the discussion started off with an extremely inflammatory metaphor to one of the most despicable figures in online media. That comes across as more of a personal attack than an issue with the quality of her analysis.
If you don't like things being us vs. them, it's generally most helpful to keep things focused on concrete problems and specific facts rather than speculating about peoples' motivations or making declarative statements about their virtues or lack thereof.
I want to point out that the "inflammatory" metaphor was speaking of her work and how it has no value. My exact words were "She is basically an Alex Jones type but for the left, she does not have...
I want to point out that the "inflammatory" metaphor was speaking of her work and how it has no value. My exact words were "She is basically an Alex Jones type but for the left, she does not have the insight or knowledge of someone such as ContraPoints." That statement is of her quality, not her character. This could have been a discussion about her work if you engaged with me about it, thankfully some are.
You've said both that her ideas have merit (which I interpret as having some value) but are poorly communicated and that her work has no value. Which stance are you actually arguing for and why?...
You've said both that her ideas have merit (which I interpret as having some value) but are poorly communicated and that her work has no value. Which stance are you actually arguing for and why?
If the first is true, why not just ignore her? If she has a point but isn't explaining well, move on to a different creator that does it better and let her fall out of your memory. If you think she's getting unwarranted attention why bring more attention to her by providing additional criticism? As far as I can tell, she's not spouting harmful ideas that require active resistance, just basic feminism.
(Not trying to dogpile here, I know you've been getting a lot of replies, just curious about some statements that seem contradictory and why there's so much passion about her if all she really did was be a mediocre content creator).
In short, she twists facts and lies about things to fit her narrative. She also has real fact and points in her videos, but when its mixed with lies you no longer are credible in my eyes.
In short, she twists facts and lies about things to fit her narrative. She also has real fact and points in her videos, but when its mixed with lies you no longer are credible in my eyes.
I don't think the response you're getting proves that discussing Anita is impossible, I think it proves that comparing someone to Alex Jones is impossible.
I don't think the response you're getting proves that discussing Anita is impossible, I think it proves that comparing someone to Alex Jones is impossible.
Either I've missed Sarkeesian doing some truly horrific shit, or you're not fully informed of Alex Jones' actions. This is not a viable comparison and it discolours an entire take. I know true...
Either I've missed Sarkeesian doing some truly horrific shit, or you're not fully informed of Alex Jones' actions.
This is not a viable comparison and it discolours an entire take.
I know true feminists who dislike Sarkeesian's content from her pre-gaming focused days when she was working primarily around feminist literature, and they found her lacking. I understand the notion that she's a mediocre voice who has been elevated to higher levels than many feel she deserves, from both a progressive feminist stance and from a far right insecure Gamer stance. But this only means the way one expresses their exact displeasure with her work is more important than usual.
The other "dissenting" opinion was not nuked because it was dissenting. It was because it was derisive and accusatory of something that doesn't actually make any sense with two seconds of thought, and the person demonstrated an attitude on the matter that read like a GamerGater. Other people have already pointed out the issues with their comments, and it is extremely charitable (and borderline disingenuous) to refer to it as being removed for being "dissenting" when it was just someone manufacturing outrage.
I use Alex Jones as an example of someone spouting poorly constructed and informed opinions and refusing to have any self reflection. As for the nuked comment, if they were really that terrible I...
I use Alex Jones as an example of someone spouting poorly constructed and informed opinions and refusing to have any self reflection. As for the nuked comment, if they were really that terrible I apologize for seemingly defending them. All I was able to read is the responses which are just as accusatory as the ones I am receiving now for a opinion that is ridiculously tame.
I understand the opinion you were stating is fairly tame but the way it was expressed makes it seem not tame. Again, Alex Jones comparison really discolours the whole take. Even your description...
I understand the opinion you were stating is fairly tame but the way it was expressed makes it seem not tame. Again, Alex Jones comparison really discolours the whole take. Even your description of his faults is much nicer than what he is actually infamous for and more commonly associated with.
When it comes to expressing an opinion on someone who is surrounded by false accusations and charges, precision of both connotation and denotation is more important than usual.
Lets make it clear then, fuck Alex Jones he is far worse of a human being. When I think of the right and crappy opinions his name was the first to pop into my head. I hope people can see how these...
Lets make it clear then, fuck Alex Jones he is far worse of a human being. When I think of the right and crappy opinions his name was the first to pop into my head. I hope people can see how these kind of discussion can clearly push people into the waiting arms of one extreme or the other. I have an opinion on a woman that wrote a opinion peice, yet I am having to defend it like I'm a flat earther or some shit.
I think us all dog piling on you is a bit much as you're being forced to respond to several sets of comments, mine included, which is exhausting. But I just want to really point out that I don't...
I think us all dog piling on you is a bit much as you're being forced to respond to several sets of comments, mine included, which is exhausting. But I just want to really point out that I don't think people are questioning your morality or thinking you like Alex Jones or something -- your original comparison itself presents him as a negative figure. You don't sound like a bad dude or anything to me, but that your negative reception here is a bit self-inflicted.
I have an opinion on a woman that wrote a opinion peice, yet I am having to defend it like I'm a flat earther or some shit.
We're not critical of your relation to Alex Jones, but Alex Jones' relevancy as a comparison to Sarkeesian -- especially given how people have treated her (nightmare stuff) and how inflammatory and dare-I-say evil Jones is (even more nightmare stuff). You brought matches and gasoline to a dry forest and are upset a fire broke out.
It's ok for the dog pile crowd to take a step back. Give more reconciliatory voices a chance to speak. Give comment-OP a chance to breathe. This thread will probably still be here tomorrow. It's...
Exemplary
I think us all dog piling on you is a bit much as you're being forced to respond to several sets of comments, mine included, which is exhausting.
It's ok for the dog pile crowd to take a step back. Give more reconciliatory voices a chance to speak. Give comment-OP a chance to breathe. This thread will probably still be here tomorrow.
It's ok for comment-OP to take a step back. This thread will probably still be here tomorrow. The dog pile shouldn't hold lack of a timely response against you.
It's ok for comment-OP to edit their original comments to defuse and better shape future discussions. A note that the comment was edited is appreciated.
It's imo also ok to retract a statement and refuse to argue it further.
It is highly encouraged to reparatively read comments by the "other side" and apply the least controversial and least strawman interpretation. Too many times when these discussions go off the rails it's misunderstandings.
I feel this is falling into a common reddit anti-pattern: OP wants to express a point, uses a not perfect metaphor and the thread becomes about arguing about the metaphor. It's not very productive...
I feel this is falling into a common reddit anti-pattern: OP wants to express a point, uses a not perfect metaphor and the thread becomes about arguing about the metaphor. It's not very productive and gets off topic quickly.
I think the main point OP wanted to say is that Anita posted the video equivalent of flame bait, and while the ideas may have merit, the results were very much intended. OP used one idea of someone who posts flame bait. The subject isn't perfect but arguing over the metaphor takes away from the actual topic of flame bait (ironically enough).
I don't know if that speaks more to the audience that falls for it or the intentions of the creator, but no one's exactly made traction blaming the readers for falling for clickbait.
It's become about arguing the metaphor because the OP themselves kept arguing the metaphor. Don't accuse the audience of "reddit anti-pattern". We are not the ones doubling down on our clearly...
It's become about arguing the metaphor because the OP themselves kept arguing the metaphor. Don't accuse the audience of "reddit anti-pattern". We are not the ones doubling down on our clearly problematic rhetoric accusing other people of "losing their minds" while ignoring what everyone is saying.
I, and many others, attempted to explain to OP why the comparison was bad. I even went out of my way to express that I understood what the OP's more nuanced take was supposed to be twice but to tell them that their comparison is really, really, really bad and ruins their rhetoric. And they ignored it in favour of justifying about their poor comparison in yet another way.
If anyone here has demonstrated a reddit pattern, it is the person who is accusing everyone else of being wrong, making aggressive edits, and trying to hide the disingenuity as much as possible. Not a single one of the re-justifications from OP makes their comparison magically good enough to not take over their entire argument, and their edit only makes me wonder what their real goal is if they're sticking to such a problematic comparison despite all the backlash. Your idea of their point only makes me wonder about the disingenuity more because the idea that Sarkeesian was just trying to manufacture outrage was a GamerGate accusation in response to her actual content and it was falsely portrayed as such by that group for months.
I don't see why the OP is deserving of such charitability when they refuse to display any self-awareness or growth or willingness to improve their argument, only defensiveness and finger-pointing that it's everyone else's fault and not their own.
It takes two to tango, and at some point it's best to realize when something is going off the rails and re-focus. Don't assign blame, focus on results. I don't care whose fault it is, and I only...
Don't accuse the audience of "reddit anti-pattern:
It takes two to tango, and at some point it's best to realize when something is going off the rails and re-focus. Don't assign blame, focus on results.
I don't care whose fault it is, and I only see irony in accusing OP of defensiveness and finger-pointing only to do the same when I point out issues with this conversation.
Your idea of their point only makes me wonder about the disingenuity more because the idea that Sarkeesian was just trying to manufacture outrage is simply wrong.
I'm not OP so I don't know their true intentions. Feel free to ask to clarify instead of assuming you know what they meant. Another common issue that leads to flame wars; focus on understanding, not debating.
I just want to point out the dark irony of you saying this while the accusation we're trying to fight against in here is the notion that Sarkeesian was disingenuous in her views, intentionally...
Another common issue that leads to flame wars; focus on understanding, not debating.
I just want to point out the dark irony of you saying this while the accusation we're trying to fight against in here is the notion that Sarkeesian was disingenuous in her views, intentionally dishonest, or intentionally trying to stir trouble and backlash -- rather than the substance of the videos themselves which are banal and essentially harmless.
If you think her stuff actually counts as flame bait (which I'm not sure of from the conversation this far) then, well, shrugs. kfwyre's comment which is now the top comment is a far better bookend to this thread than anything I can write.
I'm just trawling this thread at this point -- so maybe I'm being a pest, but I just can't reconcile how these statements can be true https://youtu.be/X6p5AZp7r_Q?si=4MXlMwGowDXI2xod if you just...
I'm just trawling this thread at this point -- so maybe I'm being a pest, but I just can't reconcile how these statements can be true
The way this woman was treated was truely horrible, that said it is exactly the kind of response she was looking for. She is basically an Alex Jones type but for the left
The ideas of her essays had merit, but were so painfully executed in such an obvious bias and reaching manner which is why she received the angry backlash she got.
if you just watch like, the first episode of the Tropes vs. Women which is almost painfully dry in its dissection of the topic. Like others said, it's like an intro woman studies college lecture. That this is somehow the "Alex Jones of the left" is just silly to me.
Let's be real here, no one on the left is the equivalent of Alex Jones, the left is just factually not as shitty as the right is. That said, I am speaking about how they are similar in the way...
Let's be real here, no one on the left is the equivalent of Alex Jones, the left is just factually not as shitty as the right is. That said, I am speaking about how they are similar in the way they have zero self reflection and have very poorly constructed opinions. However she absolutely has no equivalent to the stupidity of chemicals making frogs gay.
Lol my friend, you're the one the who made the comparison in the first place which invited a whole host of unnecessary distractions. As an aside there are indeed some really awful leftists, but at...
Let's be real here, no one on the left is the equivalent of Alex Jones, the left is just factually not as shitty as the right is.
Lol my friend, you're the one the who made the comparison in the first place which invited a whole host of unnecessary distractions. As an aside there are indeed some really awful leftists, but at least in American discourse, they're not as common or popularized.
That said, I am speaking about how they are similar in the way they have zero self reflection and have very poorly constructed opinions.
This is the important bit -- however -- can you elaborate on this? I linked a pretty representative example of her most popular work, and it comes across as pretty reasonable to me and even includes a bunch of cool little historical footnotes about game history (like how Ms. Pacman started out as a mod sold to arcade manufactures). She starts off the series saying:
This series will include critical analysis of many beloved gamers and characters, but remember that is both possible, and even necessary, to enjoy media, while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.
I'm interested in what you consider to be lacking in self-reflection.
She very clearly twists items to fit the narrative she wants to build. I am trying to remember which video it was in, but to me the most egregious instance was her speaking of the video game...
She very clearly twists items to fit the narrative she wants to build. I am trying to remember which video it was in, but to me the most egregious instance was her speaking of the video game Hitman and talking about how it promotes killing and desecrating strippers in a certain level. In reality, the game actively punishes you if you harm anyone that is not your soul target of the mission. She does this alot. Some of her points are valid, but that its mixed with obvious fabrications are why so many see her and her viewpoint as disingenuous.
Did a little snooping, here's the video: https://youtu.be/4ZPSrwedvsg?si=V92Dhvgk3KGVkZ6D I've played every Hitman game (including the OG one which -- well isn't great) and "punishment" is just...
In reality, the game actively punishes you if you harm anyone that is not your soul target of the mission.
I've played every Hitman game (including the OG one which -- well isn't great) and "punishment" is just token. It's barely an inconvenience to kill NPCs for the most part as it's supposed to be a puzzle sandbox experience with few invalid ways to solve the puzzle unless you want Silent Assassin.
I mean, silent assassin is the perfect run and what most people who want to solve the puzzle aim for. You can say that having a lowered score is inconvenient, but it is literally grading you a...
I mean, silent assassin is the perfect run and what most people who want to solve the puzzle aim for. You can say that having a lowered score is inconvenient, but it is literally grading you a worse player for doing so. With all that in mind, how is the game then promoting violence to those NPCs? It's not, its an open choice which is not how FF portrays it.
I finished watching the video and while I think some of her examples are a bit shoehorned, there's a kind of undeniable kernel of truth to her overall point of using sex workers as "window...
I finished watching the video and while I think some of her examples are a bit shoehorned, there's a kind of undeniable kernel of truth to her overall point of using sex workers as "window dressing" in lots of video games with bespoke interactions or dialog put in the game if you abuse them in some manner. Now all civilian NPCs are window dressing in these games at worst being a potential danger to your stealth, but it's telling how and why a game chooses its settings. This is about authorial intent.
Laser focusing on how "disincentivized" the player is from acting evil in say Hitman misses the forest for the trees especially when the explicit text of the game is clearly uninterested in having a nuanced take on female sexualization anyway and is instead going for titillation. I'm not saying Hitman: Absolution necessarily bad because of this, or people who like it are bad, but there's clearly accepted attitudes built into the game's DNA she's pointing out.
As I said, I believe she has some valid points but sandwiched between blatant misrepresentations. I believe in the same video she mentions GTA and how one of the few built in mechanics in the game...
As I said, I believe she has some valid points but sandwiched between blatant misrepresentations. I believe in the same video she mentions GTA and how one of the few built in mechanics in the game are using prostitutes. This is an optional activity but the fact it is one of the only NPC interactions in the game it can be seen as sexist. That is something I agree with for the most part, but when she twists things to fit her narrative it basically makes me not want to engage with her content because it is already coming from a dishonest place.
As for the over the top titillation, that is something I would completely agree with. But that is something never brought up by her if I am remembering correctly. Her critique was game mechanic based, which basically shows why I think her critique is poor. But if you get value from her that is cool, you clearly see her essays are not bulletproof in all ways and I appreciate that and value your opinion because of it.
It's because she did not play the games she criticized, a point constantly lost in the vitriol of GamerGate. Imagine criticizing a movie you never actually watched... then making a Youtube channel...
the most egregious instance was her speaking of the video game Hitman and talking about how it promotes killing and desecrating strippers in a certain level. In reality, the game actively punishes you if you harm anyone that is not your soul target of the mission. She does this alot.
It's because she did not play the games she criticized, a point constantly lost in the vitriol of GamerGate. Imagine criticizing a movie you never actually watched... then making a Youtube channel about your criticisms.
She wasn't critiquing any specific game, she was critiquing well worn tropes in gaming as a whole with mentions to specific games for reference. Since it's a broad survey, there's obviously going...
She wasn't critiquing any specific game, she was critiquing well worn tropes in gaming as a whole with mentions to specific games for reference. Since it's a broad survey, there's obviously going to be specific stuff you only do a cursory glance of. If someone was out to critique Hollywood as an institution, it would be unreasonable to expect them to have watched every single movie Hollywood has ever put out before they're allowed to comment.
A lot of the GamerGate vitriol literally just seemed to be people not understanding how journalism or literary critique work, and applying standards to critique that are either basically impossible for anyone to execute fully or just non-issues.
Oh lord it's been literal decades since I engaged in some of this stuff, but others at the time had significant collections of evidence that she didn't play the games. She used screenshots and...
Oh lord it's been literal decades since I engaged in some of this stuff, but others at the time had significant collections of evidence that she didn't play the games. She used screenshots and video from other youtubers instead of creating her own (and if I recall, she didn't credit these other creators), she got basic fundamental facts about the games wrong, and she rather publicly said that she didn't even like video games. These were the essential kernels of truth that got buried in mountains of sexist, misogynistic vitriol aimed at her.
IIRC (and again, so much of these is from literally a decade ago, so please forgive me if I misremember things) part of her Kickstarter was to purchase the games she was supposed to then play and...
She used screenshots and video from other youtubers instead of creating her own
this...seems fine to me?
IIRC (and again, so much of these is from literally a decade ago, so please forgive me if I misremember things) part of her Kickstarter was to purchase the games she was supposed to then play and critique. If she didn't even play the games, what was the point of raising money to purchase them?
as far as I know, they never got death threats about it, and it didn't spawn a backlash that was about "ethics in podcast sources" with its own subreddit
I see your subtext here and want to make it abundantly clear: she did not deserve the backlash nor the death threats. Anyone who threatened her was 100% in the wrong, full stop.
The other comments I'm going to have go and Google around a bit.
First Edit: the quote I think my brain remembers is:
"I'm not a gamer, I don't like video games, they're all about blowing off each others heads, they're just gross. I actually had to learn a lot about video games in the process of making this"
Which is not only profoundly ignorant but a good demonstration of the bias she brought into her FF project.
Second edit:
is there a concrete example or examples of this you can point to?
The Hitman one is of course the primary one that everyone goes back to, and for good reason.
"One game that Sarkeesian accused of being sexist was Hitman: Absolution. She showed a segment when a player killed multiple strippers and dragged the bodies around."
As others have pointed out, the point of the Hitman games was to not kill the non-target NPCs. You actually have to go out of your way to kill multiple strippers in the game.
Additional edit, since I thought of it: She also didn't deserve the sexist, misogynistic insults towards her appearance and presentation either. Just wanted to put that out there.
Nice comment, but quick aside: The Hitman stuff she brings up in both her Tropes vs Women video series as well as some lectures she's given (though I can't remember which or where). As far as the...
Nice comment, but quick aside: The Hitman stuff she brings up in both her Tropes vs Women video series as well as some lectures she's given (though I can't remember which or where). As far as the video series is concerned (which probably had the most public exposure) you can find it here:
IIRC, the main criticism feminists (not sure about Sarkeesian) had about sexism in Hitman: Absolution was that the game introduced a faction of female assassins dressed as sexy nuns. In a way,...
IIRC, the main criticism feminists (not sure about Sarkeesian) had about sexism in Hitman: Absolution was that the game introduced a faction of female assassins dressed as sexy nuns.
In a way, Feminist Frequency ended up being an ideal target for this sort of nut-picking approach to character assassination because her videos are so elementary and dry that nobody wants to actually sit through them. The hate-watchers will, because hating on things is a self-rewarding behavior in the same way my dog feels very accomplished when he barks at the mailman. But feminists already suspect what she's saying, gamers aware of these social dynamics already know, and she wasn't saying much that was new or interesting so who else is gonna want to watch it?
You're combining two separate events. 'Ethics in games journalism' was in response to allegations that journalists were giving favorite coverage to developers they were involved with (romantically...
it didn't spawn a backlash that was about "ethics in podcast sources" with its own subreddit
You're combining two separate events. 'Ethics in games journalism' was in response to allegations that journalists were giving favorite coverage to developers they were involved with (romantically and otherwise) without disclosure.
The Antia stuff was primarily because she was a woman saying things on the Internet and also because her work misrepresented parts of games despite the games she referenced sometimes having more problematic content that was never brought up.
These are two things in vacuum, but they were absolutely related under the GamerGate umbrella as a unified cultural phenomenon especially during 2014-2015. The online hate mob had a rogue's...
These are two things in vacuum, but they were absolutely related under the GamerGate umbrella as a unified cultural phenomenon especially during 2014-2015. The online hate mob had a rogue's gallery of villains (Batman style) and both these women endured the same abuse and harassment acutely over much of the same time period. The frankly mild criticism you could apply to both of them (which is debatable) was so thoroughly overshadowed by the vitriol of the event that it's hard for me to even bring that stuff up alongside it without feeling absurd.
I'm going to be upfront and say that I've watched Anita's videos and I've played Zoe's games and I don't care for either of them. I'm also more critical of the journalism aspect than Anita's...
I'm going to be upfront and say that I've watched Anita's videos and I've played Zoe's games and I don't care for either of them.
I'm also more critical of the journalism aspect than Anita's videos - as being the press generally means you should be impartial or just admit when you're not. Full disclosure, I work in a similar field and have covered projects that I have conflicting interests in and have always just made disclosure.
And, the big one, GameGate was such a completely unhinged wacko shack that it actually made me sad.
I'm not going to say that I'm sad to see FF go. Between that and CON and so many other initiatives that have appeared and faded away, I had honestly assumed FF had just floated away as well.
At the end of the day, you're correct that discourse around the events was entirely too toxic to touch even with rubber gloves. I think it's important to note the differences though. If we just say "GameGate was about hating women, end of story" we miss the subtilty that there are legitimate grievances in there to lure people in. And, unfortunately like Bannon said, if you bring them in with a grievance and the other 'side' simply vilifies them they'll double down to support you and the hooks are in. I'm paraphrasing him but that was, in my opinion, the meat of his strategy.
I don't really disagree with your overall point or anything, like even if we agree Sarkeesian's work is at best mediocre -- which I don't but will for the sake of argument -- what is so damned...
I think it's important to note the differences though. If we just say "GameGate was about hating women, end of story" we miss the subtilty that there are legitimate grievances in there to lure people in. And, unfortunately like Bannon said, if you bring them in with a grievance and the other 'side' simply vilifies them they'll double down to support you and the hooks are in. I'm paraphrasing him but that was, in my opinion, the meat of his strategy.
I don't really disagree with your overall point or anything, like even if we agree Sarkeesian's work is at best mediocre -- which I don't but will for the sake of argument -- what is so damned important about these specific grievances? Why can't a women just make something of 6/10 quality and endure the normal internet reaction towards mediocrity? Or more cynically, why is the "normal" reaction so evil? Clearly she, and others, tapped into something very ugly about our culture. Like, I understand the overall point, if you make the reasonable criticism "appear" taboo, you encourage people to vaguely side with #GG with bad actors hoping to claw them in deeper. But that perspective so utterly infantilizes men like we're unable to help ourselves get swept into hate mobs because 'oh no, she slightly got Hitman: Absolution wrong.'*
Maybe I'm just venting at this point, and I don't think my writing here is particularly coherent, but let me use a metaphor: If I make a tasteless joke (rude, uncouth, careless, obviously worthy of social critique) and their response is to beat me utterly senseless to an inch of my life and hospitalize me, is the situation in any way benefited from everyone rushing to say "We must discuss the tasteless joke or we'll encourage people to side with the brute!"?
That sounds nuts to me. It's so incredibly myopic. The small faux pas is nearly irrelevant at this point because the onus of the problem is clearly elsewhere. Anyway, I'm going to chill from this thread and watch Star Trek reruns instead.
*(ignoring the fact the window dressing point she's making is so obviously true in many games...)
Yeah, the Feminist Frequency part of the whole catastrophe was never really engaging to me and, frankly, allowed me to see the dirty side of the GameGate fiasco nice and early. To your point, if...
Yeah, the Feminist Frequency part of the whole catastrophe was never really engaging to me and, frankly, allowed me to see the dirty side of the GameGate fiasco nice and early.
To your point, if you happen to walk into a predominantly black neighborhood and being making, as you called them, tasteless jokes about minorities in America and got your ass beat - would the context matter there? Maybe not for the fact that battery was committed against you but your actions would be taken into account during sentencing.
Being able to tell a person "I see why you arrived at this juncture but I believe you're going about this wrong." Is textbook de-escalation - but, it's also not your job to deradicalize every discord group online singlehandedly.
Enjoy your Star Trek! The less brainpower wasted on GG the better these days.
I don't want to get too bogged into arguing metaphors. I was just trying to convey how small things, even if legitimate, should not be used as a shield for obvious egregious wrongdoing. In the US...
I don't want to get too bogged into arguing metaphors. I was just trying to convey how small things, even if legitimate, should not be used as a shield for obvious egregious wrongdoing. In the US at least "fighting words" are a thing, so your hypothetical involves bringing so in many disparate concepts, let alone that racial angle, we'll get nowhere.
Enjoy your Star Trek! The less brainpower wasted on GG the better these days.
Opening such a brazenly incorrect statement with "let's be real here" is just an insult to the intelligence of anyone who reads this. As someone who holds no particular allegiance to either side...
Let's be real here, no one on the left is the equivalent of Alex Jones, the left is just factually not as shitty as the right is.
Opening such a brazenly incorrect statement with "let's be real here" is just an insult to the intelligence of anyone who reads this. As someone who holds no particular allegiance to either side of American binary politics and considers myself a pretty strict centrist I've seen some awful behaviour from either side of the aisle in the name of their political ideals, the key difference being that extreme liberalism is considered socially acceptable while extreme conservatism isn't. Alex Jones may have said some moronic shit that I would never agree with, but I've also heard extreme leftists preach their extreme ideals only to denigrate anyone who has an opposing opinion as a Nazi or other similar slander.
Nobody should be absolved of their shitty behaviour simply because their political cause happens to be the more socially-acceptable one at any given point in history.
Alex Jones currently owes over a billion dollars in damages for defaming school shootings victims. (Like, literally spreading conspiracies that they're all crisis actors and doxxing them, leading...
Alex Jones currently owes over a billion dollars in damages for defaming school shootings victims. (Like, literally spreading conspiracies that they're all crisis actors and doxxing them, leading to the victims receiving death threats and having to leave their homes). Nobody on the left approaches that level of measurably reckless speech.
To be fair, no one popular on the left uses speech that recklessly. There are some truly terrible extreme left wing characters, but their reach is tiny, partly because they are not backed by...
To be fair, no one popular on the left uses speech that recklessly. There are some truly terrible extreme left wing characters, but their reach is tiny, partly because they are not backed by wealthy business people.
Sure, no doubt (although thankfully I've never encountered left-wing people as toxic as Alex Jones -- probably because I spent my time here instead of Twitter). But their reach is an important...
Sure, no doubt (although thankfully I've never encountered left-wing people as toxic as Alex Jones -- probably because I spent my time here instead of Twitter). But their reach is an important distinction! It's what makes Alex Jones dangerous and not just someone's deranged uncle.
partly because they are not backed by wealthy business people.
Does Alex Jones have wealthy business patrons? My impression is that he's just grifted off loons.
I can't speak to Alex Jones specifically, but Musk is currently replatforming hate mongers on Twitter/X. Fox publicizes spokespeople for hate frequently, so that is Murdoch backing. I am...
I can't speak to Alex Jones specifically, but Musk is currently replatforming hate mongers on Twitter/X. Fox publicizes spokespeople for hate frequently, so that is Murdoch backing. I am reasonably sure that there is more hidden backing as well. Organizations like the John Birch society back in the day always had business allies. Smedley Butler stopped the business plot, but the right is still backed by people who want to kill government regulation and entitlement//public benefits programs. Fomenting hatred is a tactic. It is not without purpose.
Edit https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The monetary value is irrelevant, he could have been ordered to pay 50 cents or a trillion dollars and it wouldn't change the impact his speech had. That being said (and as much as I would...
The monetary value is irrelevant, he could have been ordered to pay 50 cents or a trillion dollars and it wouldn't change the impact his speech had. That being said (and as much as I would personally disagree with his views), if he wants to question the legitimacy of a national tragedy that's his prerogative, just like how people can claim to believe the earth is flat despite how counter-productive to collective education those claims may be. Doxxing victims with intent is another matter entirely if that's true, but I'm not super well-informed about Jones other than the fact that he's a pretty wild conspiracy nutter.
You probably shouldn't speak to this case if you're not informed on it. It's extremely well publicized, you can hear dozens of hours of testimony for yourself if you like. I'm happy to send you...
You probably shouldn't speak to this case if you're not informed on it. It's extremely well publicized, you can hear dozens of hours of testimony for yourself if you like. I'm happy to send you links if that's something you'd be interested in. If you were informed on the case, you would know that he absolutely harmed these families and the monetary value of the compensation is absolutely significant and demonstrative of his negligence and malice both in defaming these families and in his conduct during the case.
I've read a fair few articles about his legal issues over the past year, I wasn't writing quite as literally as I usually do - what I meant was that I'm not super well-informed on the finer...
I've read a fair few articles about his legal issues over the past year, I wasn't writing quite as literally as I usually do - what I meant was that I'm not super well-informed on the finer details like whether or not he doxxed any information about the victims that wasn't already publicly available. I don't watch his videos so I also don't know whether or not he actually incited harassment against the families in a literal sense, ergo whether or not he should be held liable for the actions of others.
As for your "if you were informed you would know" statement, the monetary value is truly irrelevant. Some Sandy Hook survivor families might see the ordered damages as not enough while others might see them as far and above what they were expecting, and that inherent subjectivity is the proof that a monetary value awarded by a court cannot possibly represent damage to a person's livelihood, health or well being. On top of that there are any number of confounding factors during a trial that would affect the outcome of damages, which could be as simple and transient as the mood of the judge and jury on the day of ruling.
Most importantly, and the point I made in my earlier comment, the legal damages are irrelevant because no dollar amount can change what the victims' families had to go through. The nature of immeasurable damage to a family's wellbeing is very self-explanatory.
Unlike the others hyperfocusing on the Alex Jones comparison, I get what you're saying. Sarkeesian lacked the scholarly rigor that she clearly wanted, and that others will claim she had, but it's...
Unlike the others hyperfocusing on the Alex Jones comparison, I get what you're saying. Sarkeesian lacked the scholarly rigor that she clearly wanted, and that others will claim she had, but it's impossible to even have that discussion without it devolving into the vitriol that surrounded her. I wish nothing but the best for her and hope she finds peace and quiet in her life post-FF, but I can't say that FF brought anything resembling "good discourse" to the internet.
If anything it was what lead to large companies using it to advertise their products. The all female GhostBuster movie that became a lightning rod being a perfect manufacturered example.
If anything it was what lead to large companies using it to advertise their products. The all female GhostBuster movie that became a lightning rod being a perfect manufacturered example.
I've watched some of her essays. To me, they seem well researched. She uses lots of examples from multiple games to make a point that is relevant and cogent . Most commentary videos restrict their...
I've watched some of her essays. To me, they seem well researched. She uses lots of examples from multiple games to make a point that is relevant and cogent . Most commentary videos restrict their focus to a single body of work. That's a problem when making generalizations.
Comparing Sarkeesian to Alex Jones is so profoundly wrong, and on so many levels, that I'm at a loss as to how to respond. I can only assume that you are being extremely biased and unfair, and I'm not sure why. I'm not exactly angered or "triggered"... But I am baffled and concerned. That's the most absurd take I've read in quite a while.
Ok, but I am a GenX woman. I have thoroughly enjoyed big games including DragonAge 1 2 and 3, Mass Effect 1 2 and 3, The Witcher 3, Skyrim and more. I hate hate hate Candy Crush. Am I not to ask...
Ok, but I am a GenX woman. I have thoroughly enjoyed big games including DragonAge 1 2 and 3, Mass Effect 1 2 and 3, The Witcher 3, Skyrim and more. I hate hate hate Candy Crush. Am I not to ask the game companies to also consider me and my needs/desires in games?
Has Bethesada, Bioware, or CDPR not had considerations to your needs/desires? I get the general point, but you chose games known for their blank slate characterizations with a character who's...
Am I not to ask the game companies to also consider me and my needs/desires in games?
Has Bethesada, Bioware, or CDPR not had considerations to your needs/desires? I get the general point, but you chose games known for their blank slate characterizations with a character who's gender you can switch. There is some male assumptions despite that, but they seem to be trying to make stories that don't strongly consider gender as a result of that choice.
Also interesting because all of those series excep Witcher have been semi-dormant. Skyrim is 2011 Dragon Age 3 is 2013, and Mass Effect Andromeda is 2012. I imagine any new entry will be about as similar to those entries as God of War 3 is to God of War (2017).
It's funny that you state this because Feminist Frequency actually has a whole video where a male character is viewed as the default, or canonical, version, but there is an option to play as a...
Has Bethesada, Bioware, or CDPR not had considerations to your needs/desires? I get the general point, but you chose games known for their blank slate characterizations with a character who's gender you can switch.
It's funny that you state this because Feminist Frequency actually has a whole video where a male character is viewed as the default, or canonical, version, but there is an option to play as a female character. I remember noting this when I played KOTOR that although I played as a female character, the "canon" player character is considered male.
What she is doing is looking at games targeted at men and complaining that they are target at men, while ignoring all the other stuff out there.
It was my impression that the video series was about how those tropes in video games were harmful, regardless of whether or not the games were targeted towards men.
Perhaps, but I don't see what much can be done in the short term. Yes, in the meta sense, these are scenarios written by humans, and most game developers even in 2023 are male. In addition, story...
where a male character is viewed as the default, or canonical, version, but there is an option to play as a female character.
Perhaps, but I don't see what much can be done in the short term. Yes, in the meta sense, these are scenarios written by humans, and most game developers even in 2023 are male. In addition, story for these blank slates aren't going to micro-optimize every little piece of dialouge based on the chosen gender. Devs make these kinds of sandboxes to cut corners, not to try and capture everyone's experieces.
That's part of the problem with why I don't like too many WRPGs. The ones I love focus on the environment and have excellent worldbuilding around the character, instead of making the world feel like it stops the moment the character leaves town. But for character centric ones, when you try to target everyone you just get mush.
Long term, there could be some mmore cultural shifts, maybe even large budget studios with a majority women employed to make such titles. But I question if the end result of slightly less biased blank slates is a goal to aspire too over a more bespoke character to give their exprience with. I'd rather have more Abby's and Aloy's than flesh out Femshep just a little more (I'm fine with more male romance options in future Mass Effect games though).
I actually agree with you, but I'm confused about the relevancy to the original topic. I believe that the Feminist Frequency video I linked was specifically advocating against "blank slate"...
I actually agree with you, but I'm confused about the relevancy to the original topic. I believe that the Feminist Frequency video I linked was specifically advocating against "blank slate" characters. Sure, they're probably going to be inevitable (nor do I think it is impossible to do them well), but I would absolutely prefer a story built around a specific, well-written character.
But I believe the original comment topic had been around the idea that it's OK for the tropes discussed by Feminist Frequency to exist in "big blockbuster AAA games" because they are targeted towards men. I think there are a number of implicit assumptions here.
What she is doing is looking at games targeted at men and complaining that they are target at men, while ignoring all the other stuff out there.
Implicit is the idea that the tropes discussed by Feminist Frequency are not worthy of criticism because they are games written for and targeted towards men. I've stated above that I think the entire point of the series was to demonstrate that these tropes are inherently harmful.
There is an assumption made by the industry (and frankly a lot of male gamers) that AAA games are targeted towards men because women aren't interested in AAA games.
@boxer_dogs_dance then replies that that assumption is false, as she is interested in AAA games.
The idea is that the assumption that women aren't interested in AAA games, therefore the games should be targeted towards men is backwards. AAA games are first and foremost targeted towards men, therefore women are less interested. The popularity or industry size of mobile/casual games is neither here nor there.
It could be suggested that the Feminist Frequency videos explore why women aren't interested in AAA games. I actually think her goal is far broader; she is simply making informative videos about harmful tropes in video games. That's it! It's an attempt to educate folks who play video games about what tropes they might be exposed to without their awareness, as well as discuss how and why these tropes contribute to sexism and toxic masculinity. There is of course the hope that these discussions can then change the game industry. I do think the AAA industry actually is becoming slightly more aware of these factors; the number of games with well written female protagonists has certain increased over the years. Progress is slow, as you pointed out.
To bring it back, you asked:
Has Bethesada, Bioware, or CDPR not had considerations to your needs/desires?
The answer is, of course, no. And there are folks in this thread that seem to believe that that is OK because there is a different industry that does target women. That doesn't make much sense to me.
Let me know if I misinterpreted anyone's comments.
The fact that I am now too busy to game is beside the point. The claim that I was responding to was that women prefer casual games and that serious or hard core or violent games are male...
The fact that I am now too busy to game is beside the point.
The claim that I was responding to was that women prefer casual games and that serious or hard core or violent games are male territory. Witcher 3 is primarily Geralt's story and features female but not male sex workers in the brothels. But honestly nitpicking this is not worth it. There are a couple of answers in this thread marked exemplary. If you haven't read them yet, you could do that. I'm done with this topic.
I never mentioned that. With all due respect, an anectode doesn't disprove a mass statistic. There's little point arguing about what everyone thinks, and honesty its not very productive to...
The fact that I am now too busy to game is beside the point.
I never mentioned that.
The claim that I was responding to was that women prefer casual games and that serious or hard core or violent games are male territory
With all due respect, an anectode doesn't disprove a mass statistic. There's little point arguing about what everyone thinks, and honesty its not very productive to compartmentalize games by genre and medium on a topic this general to begin with. People like or don't like what they like.
So I wanted your personal experience on what you feel (or felt) games you seem to otherwise enjoy are misssing. But if you are done here, I apologize if I offended you.
I am literally about to leave and be offline for several days. Also talking as a woman in the context of a conversation about how another woman was so thoroughly persecuted is deeply depressing...
I am literally about to leave and be offline for several days. Also talking as a woman in the context of a conversation about how another woman was so thoroughly persecuted is deeply depressing and hard emotional work.
You criticized my example games as older and no longer relevant, so I explained why that is still my context for gaming. I am not confident that you want to understand but I am confident you want to be seen as the winner of this large discussion. I hope we all can grow/benefit from using Tildes. Deimos and cohort have fostered a very interesting online experiment in civil conversation that I value.
I simply took it as your favorite or most played games. Fallout New Vegas is my favorite game I'd still use it in the context of modern game discussion. It's a real shame even Tildes is falling...
You criticized my example games as older and no longer relevant, so I explained why that is still my context for gaming
I simply took it as your favorite or most played games. Fallout New Vegas is my favorite game I'd still use it in the context of modern game discussion.
you want to be seen as the winner of this large discussion
It's a real shame even Tildes is falling victim to this mentality. I just wanted to ponder what a 2020's era elder scrolls (i've given up on Fallout 5 being out this decade) or Mass effect would be like after being absent for a decade, given how games like God of War managed to reinvent themselves after being similarly targeted, or how devs like Guerilla transitioned from stuff like Killzone to Horizon.
Instead I end up seeing why "gamergate" is the only tag I have filtered out on this site. responses I get can barely even assume good faith despite me being here for some 6 years because of very old turf wars I've long abandoned (and avoided even in my reddit days). I'm here to seek and see others' experiences, there's nothing to "win" except knowledge and hopefully a wide world view.
I simply found it interesting how all your mentioned entries are pre-Gamergate and wonder how it would be affected over a decade after that drama. I imagine it would change for the better, but who knows? Oh well, nothing ventured, life lessons and all that. This will be my last response in this post, my apologies.
It's not a "mass statistic". That's the whole problem. It's a false premise borne from a misunderstanding of what the studies actually show. I invite you to read my comment on this factoid. The...
With all due respect, an anectode doesn't disprove a mass statistic.
It's not a "mass statistic". That's the whole problem. It's a false premise borne from a misunderstanding of what the studies actually show. I invite you to read my comment on this factoid.
The same thing you describe as an "anecdote" is actually in line with the "mass statistic" in the study. The person you were trying to convince is wrong is actually a good microcosm of the study's actual findings.
I never said it was the correct statistic, and to be frank I don't care to look up the correct mass statistic. I used "mass" in the classical sense of "this is a statistic based on a study trying...
It's not a "mass statistic". That's the whole problem.
I never said it was the correct statistic, and to be frank I don't care to look up the correct mass statistic. I used "mass" in the classical sense of "this is a statistic based on a study trying to extrapolate to a large population", not "this is a popular, well understood, and accepted statistic". I don't think we have too many of those in gaming, unfortunately.
The person you were trying to convince is wrong
I already responded to them, and stated my intentions. You seem to have misconstrued my goal in making that comment, and I apologize if I was vague.
But it wasn't. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and launched in 2011, and it's friend Terraria is another top 100 best selling game. Wii sports is similar. Pokemon is a constant...
But it wasn't. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and launched in 2011, and it's friend Terraria is another top 100 best selling game. Wii sports is similar. Pokemon is a constant industry leader, especially when it launched. Tetris, pacman, and all the other arcade classics are still some of the best selling games of all time. For a brief period Guitar Hero/Rockband were the records to beat.
Over and over again there are so many examples of well made games that are not targeting male markets leading the industry charts. It makes sense as obviously they have a larger pool of people who will buy the game.
Those are not (or were not yet) mobile or casual games, though. And we call games like Tetris and Pokemon casual retroactively; they were not considered to be that at the time. Minecraft also...
Those are not (or were not yet) mobile or casual games, though. And we call games like Tetris and Pokemon casual retroactively; they were not considered to be that at the time.
Minecraft also wasn't a huge success all at once; it took years before it became the best selling game of all time.
You can name popular series all you want, but if even half of the games released featured misogynist tropes, wouldn't it still be a huge problem?
I honestly don't want to go any further arguing about this, so I'm going to make this my last response on this particular matter.
Having lived through the second and my father living through the first, this is just not true. They were absolutely considered "casual". Tetris because it was one of the first games the "casual"...
And we call games like Tetris and Pokemon casual retroactively; they were not considered to be that at the time.
Having lived through the second and my father living through the first, this is just not true. They were absolutely considered "casual". Tetris because it was one of the first games the "casual" computer user was playing and Pokemon because the "casual" schoolkid loved it.
Hell in both cases there wasn't that much outside the "casual" market. Being into SF2 or Quake was your "serious" gamer and it was vanishingly small compared to things like pokemon.
I'm going to break my promise here because I can't help but nitpick. This is because the meanings behind those words have changed. Pokemon and Tetris were casual in that they were something you...
I'm going to break my promise here because I can't help but nitpick.
This is because the meanings behind those words have changed. Pokemon and Tetris were casual in that they were something you could pick up and enjoy a short bout of them. But they existed in a time before "casual" was made into a metagenre. It was also a time when people were a lot less serious about video games overall and they were just considered to be fun diversions mainly for kids (it was literally made for a system called "Game Boy"), so the "casual" descriptor was essentially redundant.
By that logic, no analysis is valid unless it is an analysis of the entirety of a medium. Suppose I wish to analyze films released in the theater in the US, would you say my analysis is invalid...
By that logic, no analysis is valid unless it is an analysis of the entirety of a medium. Suppose I wish to analyze films released in the theater in the US, would you say my analysis is invalid because I didn't include movies released on streaming? Or Bollywood movies? Or tv series? Or novelizations? Or comic book tie-ins? Or published screenplays?
That is not how research works, it is valid for an analysis to include Call of Duty, but not Candy Crush.
It is still an analysis, and Sarkeesian's videos are remarkably well researched, with way more concrete examples and identifed citations than any other videos about videogames I have seen. It is...
It is still an analysis, and Sarkeesian's videos are remarkably well researched, with way more concrete examples and identifed citations than any other videos about videogames I have seen. It is not possible to do cultural analysis without selecting a corpus, as an analysis of the totality of games is unfeasible. You may disagree with her conclusions. But her work follows sound academic practices and there's no reason whatsoever to dismiss it outright.
Objections such as yours are quite perplexing, given the tremendous rigour and superiority she shows when compared to almost all commentary about video game culture on YouTube. I gotta be honest, I truly have no idea what you're talking about. Such statements do not match the actual videos at all.
You are misunderstanding why there is a split, and therefore have a false litmus test. Every study I've seen on this comes with the caveat that the split is only because some genres are designed...
The gaming market is almost complete cleanly split between men and women, something like 48%/52%, along with the genres they prefer to play. How can I take any analyses about gender in video games serious that completely fails to even acknowledged that?
You are misunderstanding why there is a split, and therefore have a false litmus test.
Every study I've seen on this comes with the caveat that the split is only because some genres are designed for men for the most part and the few entries that try to appeal to women see an "unusually" high amount of female players.
This Quantic Foundry study was the most recent prominent gaming by gender study and their conclusions do not support your idea that there are natural male and female genres, but that there is a huge wasted opportunity in many genres to appeal to a wider female audience. Exceptional games within these genres that did appeal to women found they had a much higher female playerbase than games like Dudebro Powerfantasy #53452.
The whole premise of Feminist Frequency was to focus on these traditionally male genres and find out why they are not appealing to women (believe it or not, a pretty common complaint among female gamers who do want to play more AAA FPS games and racing games), and you are effectively suggesting here that the problem with FF is that they didn't "stay in their lane" by sticking to "traditionally female" genres so that they wouldn't have anything to complain about.
To paraphrase someone earlier in this comment chain: that's not much a response when you ignore all the stuff that contradicts your point and only cherry pick the genres that confirm it. Besides,...
To paraphrase someone earlier in this comment chain: that's not much a response when you ignore all the stuff that contradicts your point and only cherry pick the genres that confirm it.
Besides, it should not take a lot to figure out why the lack of a "W" in every sports franchise name since the 80's might have led to this.
If you watch her videos attentively with an open mind, you will notice that her claims are way more nuanced and sophisticated than your characterization.
If you watch her videos attentively with an open mind, you will notice that her claims are way more nuanced and sophisticated than your characterization.
Your objection shows a misunderstanding of what her videos are meant to accomplish. I don't think it is advisable to answer a question that assumes a flawed premise :/
Your objection shows a misunderstanding of what her videos are meant to accomplish. I don't think it is advisable to answer a question that assumes a flawed premise :/
I'm not the person you're replying to, but her framework is based on generally outdated views of psychology/sociology. She's not 100% wrong but at the same time there's some level of the same...
I'm not the person you're replying to, but her framework is based on generally outdated views of psychology/sociology. She's not 100% wrong but at the same time there's some level of the same logic used to argue that violent video games cause violence, which has time and time again been proven to not be true.
She will often dismiss/ignore/leave out evidence contrary to her claims, and it's really just hard to take everything she says at face value when you ignore/hand wave such things. There's also the way she presents evidence to sometimes imply things that aren't known as fact?
I think her overall goal is correct, and she's probably sincere about her efforts, but I too often feel she's working backwards from her conclusion, which is annoying because I don't think it's that far from the truth and it's absolutely important to talk about.
I can't speak about her Feminist Frequency channel as a whole, but if you're talking about her most divisive series, it was titled "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". Evidence contrary to her...
She will often dismiss/ignore/leave out evidence contrary to her claims, and it's really just hard to take everything she says at face value when you ignore/hand wave such things.
I can't speak about her Feminist Frequency channel as a whole, but if you're talking about her most divisive series, it was titled "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". Evidence contrary to her claims would have been irrelevant, since those would not be tropes by definition.
I'll back up what @Genuinely Crooked was saying; concrete examples of specific claims would be much more helpful than generalized concepts.
I'm sure they would, but frankly, I don't really relish the idea of digging up examples of something I last looked into 5+ years ago, and were generally not enjoyable to discuss then. Especially...
I'm sure they would, but frankly, I don't really relish the idea of digging up examples of something I last looked into 5+ years ago, and were generally not enjoyable to discuss then. Especially when so many things have been removed or retold and it's digging through hours of footage and then having to dig up the papers she cites.
Which as another red flag to me the fact she doesn't often link papers or mention their name, just quote them, is something I will always see as distastefully impersonating research rather than actually doing it. They are real papers and real conclusions, but it's much much harder to research when you're just digging into "papers claim blah...".
In short, I think it's quite obvious where she's bending her logic to work backwards or taking 2 true things and connecting them in a way that isn't necessarily true, but I also really don't relish the idea of doing yet another research paper style dive into her. If you enjoy her content or disagree, that's great, and i'm not interested in convincing you otherwise.
You're talking about a real person here, though. It's one thing to use generalizations about half-remembered events, but it's highly unethical to speak badly about someone about something that...
You're talking about a real person here, though. It's one thing to use generalizations about half-remembered events, but it's highly unethical to speak badly about someone about something that they may or may not have done.
There is no may or may not to me. She did do these things. It's 100% apparent to me at almost any point in her videos. If you disagree that's fine but I don't owe you, or her, another dissertation...
There is no may or may not to me. She did do these things. It's 100% apparent to me at almost any point in her videos. If you disagree that's fine but I don't owe you, or her, another dissertation on why, especially years after the fact.
Again, the simple fact that other people don't even see this as an issue and are asking for references, to me, just says that they don't view her material the same ways as I do. That's fine. I already pointed out her inability to cite sources and I think that's pretty concrete. If you think it's unethical to get tired of an old conversation then so be it, but I'm also not going to just watch as some people pretend as if there aren't problems with the way she presents information.
You are strongly misrepresenting the point I am trying to make. You have made the claim "person has done bad thing", but you have not actually demonstrated that they have done such a thing....
You are strongly misrepresenting the point I am trying to make.
You have made the claim "person has done bad thing", but you have not actually demonstrated that they have done such a thing. Weather intentional or not, that's character defamation.
None of us here were present for your previous conversations. You're the one who brought this up. You did mention her not citing sources, and that's great, but you then jumped immediately into "bending her logic to work backwards or taking 2 true things and connecting them in a way that isn't necessarily true". You "yada yada"-ed out of the most important parts!
If you were tired of the conversation and weren't willing to cover your bases, the most reasonable thing to do is to not participate in the conversation.
and are me doing exactly that, and you're not even engaging on that. No, no it is not. This is inherently exclusionary and silences a ton of valid voices who don't want to do the work again and...
You have made the claim "person has done bad thing", but you have not actually demonstrated that they have done such a thing.
and
You did mention her not citing sources
are me doing exactly that, and you're not even engaging on that.
If you were tired of the conversation and weren't willing to cover your bases, the most reasonable thing to do is to not participate in the conversation.
No, no it is not. This is inherently exclusionary and silences a ton of valid voices who don't want to do the work again and again. There are a million arguments about public figures that have been argued to death. This is not some person only I and a few others have met, nor is this some new revelation. The sides of this conversation have been repeated ad nauseam over and over. If you want to research it on your own you're more than welcome to. Me offering a dissenting opinion of something so over discussed does not require I defend every scrap of statement otherwise I must be silent.
It is perfectly valid, especially with dogmatic topics such as this, to point out that there are shades of grey to the black and white picture people like to paint, and those who find that interesting can validate themselves. If someone were genuinely interested in a history on this and I was discussing in person i'd more than gladly dig up old discussions and examples, but being told I'm "defaming" someone in this case is absurd, and shows exactly why people like me don't want to discuss it, because to do anything less than what you want leads to me somehow violating a rule you've created.
I've explained over and over what my problems are with your statement, and it appears that you still don't understand it. I have engaged with your claim of her not citing sources. I have explained...
I've explained over and over what my problems are with your statement, and it appears that you still don't understand it.
I have engaged with your claim of her not citing sources. I have explained how that's not the part that I had problems with. If it isn't clear, I agree with you in that it's problematic, but as I have already said multiple times, that is not enough to justify your other statement which I quoted you verbatim so that you would understand exactly what I was trying to address, which you have yet to actually respond to. You are the one who is failing to engage with me.
In no world would I consider my comments as trying to silence you. If I were trying to do that, I'd just be tagging your comments as malice in hopes of getting your comments removed. I'm just trying to get you to provide an intellectually honest defense of your own statements. If you had just said "I don't like this person", I would have left it at that, but you didn't do that. You didn't make an "I" statement, you made a "she" statement; you were making an accusation about the things she did. I'm just asking you to be responsible for that.
I'm sorry that you feel like I've attacked you somehow. I've made every attempt to avoid coming across as hostile, but apparently that was not enough. In any case I have given up all hope of you ever engaging with my questions and am far too frustrated with your responses to continue to engage with you any further. Have a good evening.
I don’t want to add to the dogpile, but I really think you should give kfwyre’s comment a read, and strongly consider the points he brought up. They are incredibly relevant to your comment, and...
With very few people actually wanting to have a discussion about her work. Which basically proves my point.
I don’t want to add to the dogpile, but I really think you should give kfwyre’s comment a read, and strongly consider the points he brought up. They are incredibly relevant to your comment, and also explain the response you received.
Can you really say that about closing something down after 15 years? That seems far too uncharitable a take. Geeze, the world might be a better place if people stuck to things for well over a...
Can you really say that about closing something down after 15 years? That seems far too uncharitable a take. Geeze, the world might be a better place if people stuck to things for well over a decade before "moving on to the next thing" more often.
Do you have a reliable source for the claim that Sarkeesian was taking an unreasonably salary out of FF? Frankly, I find it hard to accept claims like "Feminist Frequency was intentionally stoking...
Do you have a reliable source for the claim that Sarkeesian was taking an unreasonably salary out of FF? Frankly, I find it hard to accept claims like "Feminist Frequency was intentionally stoking drama," when all they did was produce extraordinarily milquetoast feminist criticism of games that wouldn't be out of place in a 300-level college course, and as a consequence were the subject of an intense, right-wing social media storm that was laden with grossly violent rhetoric and to some extent still persists to this day. If you'll forgive my skepticism, a lot of negative comments about the organization and its founder seem to come more from long-held grudges and petty grievance than anything material.
I hate to have to say this on Tildes as it generally doesn't have this problem, but you're not going to get a good faith response. OP's comment is a literal time capsule of 2014 of #GG talking...
I hate to have to say this on Tildes as it generally doesn't have this problem, but you're not going to get a good faith response. OP's comment is a literal time capsule of 2014 of #GG talking points. Let's break down each bit:
She just wants attention.
She just wants money.
She doesn't believe what she's saying.
Her work lacks all merit and can be dismissed without further consideration.
She stole the money.
OP's comment is a cliche, an utterly thoughtless regurgitation. That none of the above is true is irrelevant.
Sadly Tildes isn't immune to misogyny. It's not as prevalent as elsewhere on the internet, but I've noticed a few misogynistic comments recently that were removed shortly after. Glad to see it...
Sadly Tildes isn't immune to misogyny. It's not as prevalent as elsewhere on the internet, but I've noticed a few misogynistic comments recently that were removed shortly after. Glad to see it isn't tolerated, but still sad to see other Tildes users spout that kind of bigotry, especially when you look in their history and see quality contributions on other topics.
I'm disappointed to see that embers from the inferno of GamerGate are clearly still smoldering here, because I feel like it means we missed one of the main lessons from the whole thing.
GamerGate relied entirely on harm laundering. It was a misogynistic and hate-driven movement that used some Very Valid Concerns as cover. This is often summed up in the "Ethics in Gaming Journalism" one-liner, but that oversimplifies the situation and doesn't really capture the depth of the specific tactic they used. The tactic exploits good faith conversation as a cover for bad faith actions.
GamerGate relied on repeatedly driving Very Valid Concern talking points against others as a way of lending credibility to abusive behaviors. I'm sarcastically capitalizing that because a lot of them are overblown or are misrepresentations, but the truth is that some of those Very Valid Concerns are, actually, valid. There's a root of truth to some of them. This is what allows them to get some purchase in the first place. Also, the fact that these concerns are "slippery" at best is an asset to the underlying aims of the hate campaign.
The Concerns serve two purposes. For one, they make it so that criticism and negativity about the individual are normalized. How many times have you wandered into an online discussion about Anita Sarkeesian and seen positivity or agreement, for example? Every converation about her includes these Concerns and everyone gets into back-and-forths about how Valid they are. Most of the people engaging in this part are doing so in good faith. They aren't out to harass anyone, but they do want to address the Concerns. The Concerns are meaningful and important and resonant.
This is what I was interested in talking about back when Tropes vs. Women came out. I wanted to look at the critique, pull apart and examine it, think through it thoughtfully, discuss it with others. I quickly found this was nearly impossible to do with any fidelity though, because of the context in which her work got put.
The context is the Concerns' secondary purpose: they make it so that other harms are less scrutinized. While we're all busy talking about the merits of specific points in Anita Sarkeesian's videos and public record, the people acting in bad faith are sending her death and rape threats, and making video games about beating her up. Their hatred doesn't just apply to Sarkeesian, mind you. It creates a hostile environment for everyone, particularly women, and acts as a latent threat against people that would speak out in support of her. Speaking about Sarkeesian now carries a significant social penalty. By not joining the hate mob, you might be subject to it yourself.
This is a silencing strategy used by the bad faith actors that tilts the conversation about the Concerns in their favor. Now, the people who are levying the Concerns in good faith aren't getting good faith answers and defenses back, because many people that would say something have outright exited the conversation. Part of what allowed Sarkeesian to face so much hate in the first place was that many people were unwilling to speak in her defense, either out of a well-founded fear or because of social sanctioning when they did.
The bad faith actors used the good faith ones without their knowledge here. By driving the Concerns so hard, they made it so that any converation about Sarkeesian had to be about and answer to the Concerns. Any conversation about her will inevitably contribute to social erosion of the community, even when everyone there is acting in good faith, because it's impossible to talk about her without addressing the associated talking points. We're doing it right here, right now, nearly a decade later. Did anyone here know she has a recent series on Nebula called That Time When that's way punchier than any of her Tropes vs. Women videos? We're not talking about that despite it being far more current and relevant, because we're still rehashing the old talking points that were so persistently driven against her that they became inescapable for everyone.
The Concerns also frame Sarkeesian as a fundamentally bad person, so that when people did do bad things to her, our internal sense of injustice was deadened. By painting her in the worst possible light, they diminished the empathy and conscience that might have been activated in us when faced with all of the shit she went through. This is why a single cultural commentator with a relatively limited audience got portrayed as something so much more than she ever was -- an evil shrew out to destroy an entire gender, industry, and artistic medium; an outsider; someone who didn't even play or like games in the first place; an untrustworthy manipulator; a con artist taking people's hard-earned money.
How did this happen? Aren't rape and death threats so much worse than cultural critique? Weren't the actions of the hate mob far worse than anything Sarkeesian ever did?
Yes, and most people agree that rape and death threats are bad. Most people can also see some surface area for legitimate criticism of Sarkeesian's ideas (as we can in nearly anything). The latter space has way more gray area than the former, which is very black-and-white. This is what GamerGate learned to exploit.
The big lesson of GamerGate was that, by driving conflict in the gray area, we pull focus from the black-and-white of the really bad stuff. The role of the Concerns was never about truth or fairness -- their purpose was to be a distraction that shields far worse harms from attention and criticism. By getting all the good faith people riled up on distractors, we missed the far more important things being done by bad faith actors.
Also, and this is arguably the most significant part of the tactic: by making her look like an aggressor, the hate mob made its actions look defensive -- and therefore more palatable.
This technique is now so embedded in to online discourse that we hardly even realize it's the case. GamerGate normalized it, and it's important to note that it's a tactic, not a partisan thing. We started calling it "cancelling" before that lost all meaning too, but the fingerprints of the tactic are all over what happened to Lindsay Ellis and Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) for example, neither of which were partisan takedowns and were, if anyhing, internal conflicts within one "side" rather than a fight between opposing sides.
If I can frame you in a way that makes it look like you are doing harm to others, I can destroy you with impunity, because people will think you're bad or deserving in the first place, and everyone else will be too busy burning themselves out debating specific minutae in a vast gray area, thereby missing the forest for the trees.
This can, of course, be used in partisan ways. The anti-trans stuff we see on the right is a perfect example of the tactic being utilized. There is an overt hatred campaign against trans people that shields itself with some Very Valid Concerns about children and detransitioning and sports and bathrooms and whatnot. Many of these people want to further the worst possible outcomes (threats, eradication) and rely on the Concerns to paint them and the broader conversation in the best possible light ("we just want sports to be fair!"). We spend our time churning in the gray areas around all of those topics, thinking that we're having valid discourse, while what we're really doing is having our attention pulled away from the people who are actively trying to make it so that trans people don't exist.
This doesn't mean there's not valid conversation to be had. The gray area exists for a reason. The Concerns often do have roots in truth. I have my own criticisms of Sarkeesian, and I'm someone who generally agrees with most of the analysis she gave in her Tropes vs. Women video series.
What it does mean is that when a topic is explicitly linked to hate-based rhetoric, we need to be extremely thoughtful in how we address it and what we say about it, if at all. Paradoxically, I feel it's often better to say nothing about the Concerns in the first place than to engage with them. Commenting on them without directly commenting on the hatred umbrella that covers the topic feels like giving an implicit pass to it. Even if we address the bad directly, it's often not with the same length or intensity as the Concerns. We'll drop a perfunctory anti-hate statement for a single sentence before diving into paragraphs about the specifics of far more minor details. In being willing to spill a lot more ink and effort and pushback over tiny bits of an argument here and there, we're giving a structural, implicit affirmation that the hatred is less important than the Concerns.
Imagine someone coming here, to this topic, right now, who genuinely did make threats against Anita Sarkeesian. Are they met with universal condemnation for their awful actions, or are they met with a conversation that still makes her look like the villain in her own story years later? A big "success" of GamerGate is that the legacy of Anita Sarkeesian still frames her as "someone who did wrong to games/gamers", when, in reality, it's the story of someone who had extreme amounts of wrong done to her while so many passively accepted or turned a blind eye to it.
I thought about jumping into several of the comment threads in this topic before I realized that I was falling into the same trap I did years ago. To be clear: I don't think anyone here is acting in bad faith, but I do think we're all communally living in the Concern gray area, and that has been so poisoned at this point that I don't even know if it's worth inhabiting.
Are we going to ever be able to have a truly meaningful, non-conflict driven discussion about Sarkeesian? Is it even worth doing at this point? Do we gain anything from rehashing years-old talking points and feelings that have calcified into something more solid now that we've sat with them for a long time and forgotten the specifics that once supported them? I'm not sure I'll ever be able to have a conversation about Anita Sarkeesian online that doesn't, in some way, launder the harms done to her, because the whole point of making her a cultural flashpoint in the first place was to allow the hatred against her to escape scrutiny. Any legitimate criticism of her ideas that I could bring feels less significant in comparison.
I don't really have a conclusion other than to say that I see the fingerprints of GamerGate in our conversations here. This topic feels like I'm going back in time. I load up the comments and we're... fighting over Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women videos. And for what? Cultural commentators are a dime-a-dozen now on YouTube and podcasts, but almost none of them get the level of scrutiny that she continues to get from work that she did years ago, which is outright ancient by the standards of the genre. We're holding on to a baggage that we don't need to hold on to, and maybe letting go of that is the best way we can give a goodbye to Feminist Frequency and a fuck you to GamerGate.
To pull Sarkeesian out of this topic then, what do we do moving forward? Not critique lazy/un-scholarly think pieces (or, potentially, outright grift) out of a fear that The Bad People will use that critique as a wedge to sneak in their vitriol? That doesn't seem healthy to me. Constantly placate The Good People with "so and so doesn't deserve vitriol, but here's why they're wrong" (which I did repeatedly in this very thread)? That seems exhausting to me. It seems like another classic double bind brought on by Bad People: do nothing and they "win", do something and they still "win".
My only thought (so that I'm contributing beyond asking questions lol) is to try and reframe critique as discussions and not debate, but that tends to get lost the instant someone picks through your response to quote the sections they can rebut and ignore the sections they can't. It's maddening.
Don't let the shitheads into the space. When people no longer feel like everything is a secret ploy to advance a side-agenda they can talk candidly.
You can see in the discussion that unfolded here how a lot of the same points were trotted out but with some hindsight it's clear they're very generic sounding. We've all heard them a bajillion times and they're not big deals in the slightest. Outside the environment of Reddit and Twitter where you're being absolutely inundated in related content all rehashing the same things, selectively compiled takedown lists of each and every minor thing you can pull out of context to make the person look bad, etc. people wouldn't even have bought into a lot of those criticisms. It's the volume of opinions with the same tone that magnify individual slights into a constant stream of hostility. But when you look at them without any of the tribalist emotional attachment it's really like "That's it? That's the beef you had that merits raising a ruckus and bringing the point up over and over again in every venue? Instead of just shrugging and moving on?"
It's the dynamics of social media that encourage people to have takes and opinions, even if they're not saying anything new. It's satisfying to participate, in part, because composing those thoughts is a way for people to process what they're seeing for themselves. It's just that nobody needs to be privy to 70,000 people all processing the same narrow slice of input in largely the same way. Once that starts happening it becomes this reinforcing feedback loop where all these different people processing the information makes everyone else think they need to engage too, and then it drives them towards adopting the same take by osmosis as well based on the skewed perspective they're getting from the content stream.
Take away that curation and editorial process and I think a lot of this evaporates. Like on Tildes, I will often type up posts and then delete them. Because the act of typing a comment or response up helps me process my thoughts on a discussion, but then once I reread my post and see it in the context of everything else I realize I'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said. So what am I adding? Sometimes it's useful if I think I'm summarizing multiple streams of ideas from different posters in one place. But for the most part there's no point. There's no karma score so I'm not getting anything for it. Nobody will even remember me saying yet another iteration of the same thoughts as 40 others in the thread. So why put myself out? This is the healthier sort of interaction that happens when the site isn't trying to elicit engagement out of you.
Editing note: I noticed I have a bad habit of using the word "just" way too much in my writing, but anytime someone "exemplaries" one of my posts I feel the need to go back and fix things like that so I don't cringe if it comes up again.
Well said. But to put it in simpler terms, which is how I tend to think about it in my own head:
I constantly find myself asking those questions to myself, especially on contentious topics where even a good faith effort by me to share my opinion might still only result in more fuel being added to the fire.
And more often than not, especially these days, I find myself realizing that simply choosing not to make a comment is the wiser course of action... and so I instead typically just wait for someone smarter, more informed, more well reasoned, and/or more eloquent (like @kfwyre, and yourself, NaraVara) to write a better comment than I ever could on the subject. And when I see such a comment I can then just try to support it with my own reply to them, building on what they already have touched on, or even just by giving them an Exemplary for their effort.
cc: @johansolo, since I think my comment addresses some of your own questions as well.
It definitely did and I appreciate it. I don't have the time right now to devote to a longer response but I wanted to take the quick second to let you and @kfwyre know of my appreciation.
Sadly if I thought like this in my own cynical mind, I would never comment here. I feel I may have taken the old 4chan mentality of "lurk moar" a bit too closely to heart, and that made me scared to comment anywhere for the longest time.
That's understandable. Maybe you could use a more forgiving version: is my personal opinion on this subject really the best contribution I can make to this debate?.
I think what you say about commenting as a way to process things yourself is a really good point. And to go a bit further, I think sometimes people want to voice how they feel rather than something more objective. And it's done in part as a way to process their own feelings through commentary, but in a way it's also done to give them a tautologically true basis to stand on.
People just want to have a thing they can say and be by default correct about it, so they don't have to feel insecure about whether what they said was wrong. So they'll talk about their opinions, because reporting what your opinions are is something you can always be right about.
And so what will happen is someone will say one thing, and another person will respond to rebutt it. And the first person will fall back and defend that it WAS indeed their opinion, while the second person will be trying to argue the broader context.
But as you say, commenting is in part processing. So to the first person, sometimes they're not deflecting. Sometimes they really are just trying to talk about their feelings and get into conflict with people trying to argue the context.
And sometimes they ARE deflecting, and they're just trying to avoid having to say they were wrong.
And it can be hard to advocate for the former without also accidentally facilitating the latter.
I think this is probably why I find I get better discussion in private Discords than I do in public commentary sections. The shitheads aren't allowed in. And since they are leftist Discords, there's still just as much disagreement and animosity!
I appreciate that you watched me open a giant can of worms and then politely handed me another and asked if I could open that one too. 😆
Those are good questions, and I honestly don't know if I can give an adequate answer. I think it's way easier for me to pick something apart than it is for me to build a solution instead, and while I've identified what I think the problem is, I genuinely don't know the solution.
To bring Sarkeesian back into it for a moment: I genuinely don't believe her critiques were lazy, un-scholarly, or that she was grifting in the first place. I honestly think the widespread impression that people have of her as such is a product of GamerGate pushing bad talking points and people looking for chances to actively disinterpret her work rather than affording it the principle of charity.
This is where the double bind you bring up comes into play, because many people of course don't share my beliefs on that and thus think I'm a sucker and she's taking me to the cleaners (not that I actually got the chance to state my case against that much, if ever, because I quickly exited all online gaming conversations and spaces once the full force of GamerGate hit). Nevertheless, I'm well aware that, from others' perspective, my willingness to give her validity is allowing a Bad Person to win with Bad Tactics, in the same way I feel about giving GamerGaters their passes for hate. It makes for a nice-looking symmetry, with an internal logic on both sides that can justify itself, but I feel that's illusory.
In the time I've been on Tildes, I've thought a lot about online conflict, and the concept I keep coming back to is "proportionality". I want to use the word "harmony", but that's got a default positive connotation that makes my attempt at crystallizing the topic outright misleading. By "proportionality", I mean having personal responses to things that are in accordance with the intensity of their antecedents (if there is a better word for this or something already established from like, psychology, let me know!). I think online platforms and social media and a lot of the emergent norms that have been established are aimed at making us lose our sense of proportionality.
To bring Sarkeesian back into it for a moment: what is the absolute worst thing she did? For the purposes of this, let's also frame her in the worst possible light: she is someone in the entertainment industry doing some trend-chasing for money -- basically, an influencer before we called them "influencers". Additionally, you could argue that her series is a type of gender discrimination. Neither of these are my genuine stance, but this isn't about me -- it's about the people who really don't like her.
From what I saw, many if not most of those people who didn't like her didn't meet the situation with proportionality. She was villainized and demonized in a way that was far out of scope with her actions. Also, there was a corresponding counterbalance of underreaction to the people doing actual harms: they benefitted from an inverted proportionality that didn't villanize or demonize them nearly enough.
Zooming back out, it looks like modern, (mostly) online culture war conflict knows that proportionality is malleable and uses that to its advantage. Maximize surface area on your target by framing them in the worst possible way. As soon as someone is in the crosshairs, every action they've ever taken and word they've ever said become "fair game" to use against them. Also, the more "evidence" you can compile (or fabricate) against them, the more you make it look like the anger, outrage, and hatred against them is, in fact, proportional.
A way I've been thinking about this is a -100 to +100 scale. Let's call it a spectrum of "intensity", with negative numbers being a sort of "negative intensity" (anger, frustration, etc.) and positive ones being a sort of "positive intensity" (delight, joy, etc.).
Now, let's look at a genuinely Very Bad Person: say, Harvey Weinstein. He is someone who is probably at the negative end of the scale for most. It's hard to put a specific number, but he probably lives in the -90s for many. Not only were his actions unconscionable, but they persisted for a long time and affected many people.
Now let's go back to Sarkeesian. Even for people who dislike her and her points, it's hard to argue that she should be that far down the negative scale. A proportional response would have her at -10, maybe -30 at most?
Of course, we know that wasn't the case. She was put at -100 by many, and I don't think this is specific to just her. I think it's actually a product of online discourse, which seems to have effectively gutted the entire middle of the scale (including 0, no response or a neutral one). People tend to get compressed into either -100 or +100, good or bad, right or wrong, etc.
This flattening is part of what makes the stuff I talked about in my original comment work. By compressing all of "bad" into the -100 slot, someone like Sarkeesian and someone like Weinstein look comparable, and, thus, the social response to each looks proportional in accordance. This is why so many were willing to overlook the threats in the first place.
It also works within topics. It's easy to look at Sarkeesian and GamerGaters and have a -100 response to both. They're both bad! They're both deserving of scorn and hatred! This, I believe, is another loss of proportionality. By a non-gutted standard, the actions of the GamerGaters should land far more down the negative scale even if we assume the worst about Sarkeesian, which is why they worked so hard to shift perceptions against her and, therefore, in their favor.
It finally has an effect on people like you and I. I can't speak for you, of course, but if I were to guess, your perception of Sarkeesian likely falls on the negative side of the scale, while mine falls on the positive. It would be trivially easy for us to shove the other to the extreme (and I think wider internet norms outright encourage this). You might be inclined to project a +100 score on me relative to Sarkeesian, which from your perspective might make me seem like an unthinking defender of her -- an easy mark for an obvious con artist. Likewise, I might project a -100 score onto you, seeing you as nothing more than another internet misogynist who got sold lies by a hate mob.
This is, of course not what I'm saying either you or I are. But, if we were to start to engage in conversation about her, the perception of opposition and the removal of any "middle" is much more likely to drive conflict between us than understanding. I think it's common on the internet to sort of automatically assume this stance in ourselves and others, and it's what leads to nitpicky back-and-forths and protracted arguments. It sets us up for, as you identified, debate rather than discussion.
I also think a lot of this is subconscious. When I first got on Tildes, I had to do a lot of "unlearning" of bad habits. I'm probably still doing that in ways I won't be aware of until later. I would see someone make a comment about something and immediately project a ton of baggage onto their comment and, thus, their identity. There are users here who I genuinely didn't like from our first interactions or after seeing some of their original comments.
Prior to our big user influx, Tildes was in "cozy mode" and so everyone saw the same set of users across the site over time. Some of those users who I'd originally pegged as people I didn't like are now some of my favorite users on the site, and I was able to change my mind on that because I got to see their human complexity over time. I'd shoved them into a -100 spot initially, based on almost no actual evidence -- just a gut feeling and some associations -- but now they've shifted over to something solidly on the positive side for me. I can even go back to some of those original comments I didn't like and see that they were coming from a different place than I assumed or, alternately, those individuals have grown out of or past those original ideas or comments. What they said five years ago isn't reflective of who they are or what they believe today.
I say all of this because I think it gives the context to swing back around to your original question: what do we do?
My thoughts are the following (and please keep in mind this is more of a scattershot of thoughts than an actual prescription or solution):
Very few things are at the -100 or +100 end of the scale. Most things are more in the middle. Also, it's an oversimplification of my own that we can even condense things down to a single number (ever feel conflicted about something -- both positive and negative at the same time?). Nevertheless, it's been helpful for me as a simple heuristic. "What's the number on this?" It helps me mitigate my own feelings and thoughts on an internet that's constantly trying to stoke outrage and anger.
The internet and social media want me at the ends of the scale, living in high-arousal emotions. There's a vast space in between those, each with its own feelings and colors and texture. Having a bit of a meta-narrative in my own head about my own proportionality has helped me better navigate different topics and even things like the daily news. It's not that I'm attempting to control my own feelings on things, but more that I'm attempting to evaluate my responses to those feelings -- is this something worth acting on? If so, how so? Before I commented my original post on this topic, I had a very negative response to this whole thing here in general. I almost jumped in, feeling that -80 feeling, and started arguing with people. It took a lot of me sorting things out before I figured out what I wanted to say, part of which was that I don't want to be the kind of person who jumps into conversations at a -80 in the first place.
One of the ways I choose to identify who to engage with is by assessing their own proportionality relative to a topic. If I thought you were a diehard GamerGater -- a -100 on Sarkeesian -- I never would have responded, and certainly not in such length. I see what I consider some disproportionality in you (and you likely see the same in me!), but I also believe that we're likely closer on the scale than we are farther away. That makes me want to talk to someone like you, rather than dismiss you out of hand.
If I had, as previously mentioned, jumped in to the conversation at my personal -80 with regards to the ongoing conversations here, I don't think things would have gone well for either of us. We likely would have started arguing, both hit our -100 intensities, and both walked away angrier than we were when we started. It's hard to "read the room" online, but I try to leave people be who are at that negative extreme, both for themselves and myself. If I do engage with someone, I try to aim for something closer to zero -- an attempt at bringing the intensity back down. I'm hoping, in writing this to you, that it comes across as a softening of the topic, not a sharpening of it. I often write long things here and get the impression that people feel kind of blindsided by them (and in some cases in the past, I've definitely written some high-intensity blindsides), but my intent is the opposite -- a low-intensity exploration that (hopefully) offers a lot to chew on.
Keeping a lower intensity can be tough when duty calls, but I often believe that saying nothing is better than keeping a conflict going, especially because most online back-and-forths quickly lose proportionality to the topic being debated. Ever see people viscerally angry about something like, I don't know, the proper way to hang a toilet paper roll? It's such an inconsequential thing, as close to 0 as you can get on the intensity scale, but a debate about it can drive everyone to -100 really quick. I try to identify situations like that and stay out of them for everyone's sake, myself included.
People are complicated. People are messy. People grow and change over time. A lot of the issues we see online come from people not allowing and understanding this in others. Someone was wrong about something? Okay, they were wrong. If they were wrong in good faith, then it was a mistake. Let them learn and grow from it. I want that leeway from others, but that also means I need to offer it to them.
Too often we get into really infantilizing situations where we assume the other person is a caricature of an individual without any depth to their feelings or experiences. I'm a believer in the idea that, if you ever want to have a good conversation with someone, then you have to dive into their personal complexity relative to a topic. It's why I find most "rational" or fact-based arguments online thoroughly uncompelling (especially because those are often just exercises in cherry-picking).
Diving into why someone believes something and what it means to them is more likely to foster understanding than any rebuttal ever will. Like, I genuinely want to know why people hate Anita Sarkeesian so much, and I also wish they would be willing to listen to my perspective on why I genuinely like her. It is very rare that we allow one another this complexity though, especially when we're standing on opposite sides of an issue, and especially when the issue is linked to a wider culture war.
There is no skeleton key or magic bullet that will magically, structurally prevent bad faith actors from poisoning the well. Every adaptation we make they will try to work around. That's what acting in bad faith is: penetration testing for social systems. If we block one avenue for access, they will try to find another one. Everything I've proposed here can and will be used by bad faith actors in disingenuous ways.
We can't necessarily fight them so much as we can be aware of it. If we try to lock things down to make them "bad faith-proof" then we do a lot of damage to good faith conversation. Meanwhile, if we take off the guardrails completely, then we give them too much leeway.
With the influx of recent users, I have seen a few that I believed to be acting in bad faith. I'm happy to report that they have ended up banned. It's hard, because I never saw any of them fully cross a clear line, but it was more of an accumulation of comments from them that gradually revealed their intent. Continually making other people's experiences worse is ban-worthy on Tildes, and I think that's the right call and way to deal with bad faith commenters. If we allow them to persist, they will erode the quality of discussion here by exhausting people and refusing reciprocity.
A ban is a social consequence that falls on their shoulders, rather than a consequence that gets distributed throughout the community (e.g. erosion of discourse, a buildup of anger or frustration, etc.). I think it's important to shield good faith commenters from the effects of bad faith ones, and bans ensure that the bad faith actors are the ones receiving the negativity of their actions.
It sounds dismissive, but ultimately I hope bad faith actors learn from their experiences and change their ways. They're people too, and they're often young and misled, as I think a lot of people swept up in GamerGate were. It's not that I never want to see them on Tildes again -- it's that, until they're able to meet and uphold our social contract, I want them to be the ones facing the consequences for their actions rather than having everyone else subsidizing that.
Popping out of slumber to just say thank you for doing this, it's one of the many, nearly uncountable reasons that I value your opinion and your presence. Unfortunately the exact opposite of this behavior is one of the many reasons I felt unwelcome on this website, and even in the time I've been mostly absent I've run across people still talking about myself and others I've known in a negative light which shows a persistent strong negative opinion which was unwilling to budge, or a desire to win gotcha points by appealing to the hivemind perspective on an issue (or simply just the perspective showing up in the comments at the right time).
You know I've noticed that some of these discussions have really died out over time, as in if culturally we've moved on from caring about whether people pronounce it gif or gif, or whether they like pineapple on their pizza. I think the internet and humanity as a whole are slowly learning how to operate in larger public spaces and I wanted to quickly reflect on how uplifting and wholesome and awesome that is! These discussions and little fights do happen occasionally and way out of proportion, but we did kinda collectively move on from being pedants about grammar with each other and other disproportional arguments on many issues.
I think issues like gamergate highlight how this disproportionality can be difficult and different for every person. If you're a woman working in gaming, you probably have a real reason to be more highly invested than someone with less intersectional identities in common with the bad behavior being called out. In Kenji Yoshino's book Say the Right Thing he presents a really simple methodology he calls the stoplight method to address and simplify this. There's some good examples in the book where he contrasts how some things may feel like an issue of policy to some, but humanity to others based on how close they are to the groups being affected. Highly recommend the book, by the way, if you haven't read it yet. 😄
This is a point I think about a lot. Over the past few generations we’ve scaled up the amount of information a person knew about the world and the number of people they interact with dramatically. We regularly interact in public spaces frequented by cities and regions worth of people and it takes a while to understand that sense of scale. If 10,000 people in your town believed the moon was fake you’d be really worried about what was happening. If 10,000 people on the internet believe the moon was fake they just have a Discord somewhere and randomly pop up to get into arguments with people who are now really worried about what’s happening.
The examples you give are small but really hopeful ways in which we’re learning to understand that the world is a REALLY big and diverse place and you’re now regularly interacting with parts of it that think about thinks in totally different ways than you. I wanted to join you in thinking that this is a great sign!
I saved up my exemplary to drop on your top level comment, and then you come out with this tour de force. People like you are why I joined this site. :)
I've really enjoyed your comments on this topic, @kfwyre. Thanks for taking the time to write them up.
What can I say except... you're welcome!
EDIT: Also if this were Reddit I would give your response gold, but it's not, so you get this comment instead.
Tildes doesn't have Gold, but it does have the Exemplary label, which is quite similar in effect... only it's free to use every 8 hours, and you can also add a personalized message to the recipient when you apply that label to their comment.
You have been here for more than 7 days, so labels should be unlocked for you now. Just click 'Label' at the bottom of the comment, and you can then apply them when appropriate... (like giving an Exemplary to kfwyre's above comment to show your appreciation for it, *hint hint* ;)
Done and done. Thank you for illuminating that feature of which I was unaware.
YVW! Glad to help. :)
If I may suggest something, I would say that it's important to be aware of the tone of the conversation and whether or not it meets your standards for nuanced and thoughtful discussion. Others in this thread have stated that repeating and rehashing the same points over and over again in a sort of one-sided, reductive manner is a pretense to dismiss Anita Sarkeesian's work wholesale, giving leeway to to attack her personally. Instead of discussing the topic (the tropes of how women are depicted in video games), there becomes a huge focus on how she did her work—to an extent that was far overblown since everything else in these videos becomes completely ignored.
If we are aware that a discussion has become unproductive and that a participant's intention is to attack a person and not discuss the topic at hand, then I think it becomes important for us to introduce those nuances ourselves. It doesn't mean that we have to take a "side" and ignore the valid criticisms. It simply means directing the conversation to examine the work and topic as a whole.
For example, based on the repeated talking points around the very short clip of Hitman, I would have assumed that that was the entirety of the video. If we take the pulse of the conversation, we can determine that these talking points neither need to be rehashed again nor contribute to a productive conversation. It's up to us to introduce other aspects and have the discussion we actually want to have.
Honestly, there are some people that you simply can't have conversations with :\ There's only so much we can do as individuals. But I think @kfwyre's point is rather to point out that it is easy to mindlessly normalize the framing of bad faith actors. We have a responsibility to be constantly aware of the tone and goal of the conversation.
Just noting down my thoughts / questions here after skimming, bc sleep is not optional:
Why though? Why do we have to rehash these discussions? Ad hoc hypothesis: because the topic was so insanely politicized, that rational discussion about it was impossible online, while irrational discussion of it was everywhere. People have rational thoughts about it, and rational counterpoints to irrational arguments of others, and they want to see it to it's conclusion. For 10 years now it was basically impossible to resolve this internal conflict in discussion with others. It was impossible to state an opinion that sees both good and bad in her work, and have it discussed in good faith. That energy needs to go somewhere, and perhaps for some it still didn't have the chance to.
I have a much simpler reason for you. It's because these conversations never had closure. It's still painful to people. It's not just one thing, either; it's a bunch of related issues that continually drown eachother out. It has become this big amorphous blob that you can't help but get some of it stuck to you no matter what you do with it.
It's also why I gave up on critiquing games journalism. Of all things, Scott Alexander broke me of this insistence to do good with this quote:
welp, I was this metaphorical principle civil libertarian and I saw the seven zillion witches firsthand. There's no point, and there was no reason to bother. I still have anger of the Germsmann controversy (something probably older than many o the people who cry "ethics in games jounalism"), I still hate how metacritic scores have so much weight in conversation, up to tying employee bonueses to it. But I am but a single person and the well has been poisoned. So I just moved on and stopped talking about it, and started cultivating youtubers, even if I 1000x prefer a written format for news over video. I have exactly one news website I follow these days, I get the rest from social media and youtubers.
It's a real shame because in one of my potentially hottest takes: I think it was absolutely genius how Gamergate managed to pull off a social media campaign in 2015 or something that lead to ads pulling out of various websites. And I'm disappointed that that is the ONLY example I can think of where this sort of campaign succeeded. It could partially be because GG changed how advertisers re-evaulate consumer feedback, but it sure feels more like a lack of trying. A bunch of angry gamers could get funding pulled when a video game writer badmouths them, but the larger populace can barely de-fund some of the biggest snake oil saleman out there. Again, a shame.
These are the real examples of real abuses. Luckily we got Giant Bomb out of it, for however long that lasted, and Obsidian seems to be in a good place these days and pretty beloved. People still make New Vegas analysis video essays which is something few games can boast. The metacritic thing is why I seek out reviewers who refuse to numerically score anything.
Good for her to have the foresight and self awareness to know she’s exhausted and burnt out and that she needs to take a step back.
I’ve seen many content creators burn out from the immense pressure of a big audience and delivering content on a less than forgiving schedule. I can only imagine what it’s like to have that and have gone through Gamergate.
I hope she gets the rest and relaxation she needs and deserves.
Burnt out might be a huge understatement. I don't hesitate to say Anita was one of the most hated people online at one point. I would know, when I was in my late teens I used to be part of the whole gamergate movement before I smartened up and left the toxicity behind. Anita had such a huge target on her back. Bringing up her name in any discussion would automatically bring people hating on her in the replies no matter where you were. I'm honestly amazed she kept going this long and I have a lot of respect for it. Hopefully we're in a better place today thanks to her efforts.
For anyone unfamiliar or even too young at this point, here's a short overview from Innuendo Studios on why she was so hated: https://youtu.be/6y8XgGhXkTQ?si=_TMiLYc3l1lxFaTu
The alt-right as it exists today (and its various incarnations over the past decade) has gotten a lot of "juice" from trading on hatred of her. If you're familiar with "breadtube" or left-leaning YouTube, there's tons of interesting takes on how the internet responded to her and how GamerGate was animated as a malicious force.
I just watched the video series, thanks for the link
I was struck by how much similarity there has been between gamergate and some of the newer antagonistic social media movements in the U.S. (e.g. COVID denialism, presidential election denialism, and most recently the "anti-woke" movement). In particular, his 4th video that discussed how the abhorrent, 4chan crowd hid within and had a symbiotic relationship with the larger "Angry Jack" crowd.
Steve Bannon was pushing gamergate articles at Breitbart and used the same tactics on the Trump campaign. You’re totally right to see parallels here. It’s a lot of the same people.
Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios has covered the history and rhetoric of right-wing thought on the internet over the years in a very approachable way. The second series he did (which is still ongoing) is called The Alt-Right Playbook and starts here: https://youtu.be/4xGawJIseNY?si=GxKw3Q4AVl9QV5c-
Some of the videos are rather lengthy so it's not something you'd probably binge in one sitting. But anyway, you're right, there's absolutely a connecting thread between the various incarnations of ultraconservative or right-wing movements online at least in the US.
Oh God, that is a video made 8 years ago, about a series that started 12 years ago! Time does go faster when you get older...
In two years, the movie Titanic will be halfway been us and Niel Armstrong landing on the Moon.
Obligatory xkcd.
I straight-up lost friends during that whole thing. I was afraid to click on the link to this discussion to be honest, even on Tildes, because I remember what it was like then and was afraid it would still be like that now. It was a really unsettling time to be a gamer and a girl, toxic only begins to describe it - it was dangerous.
I had people threatening me because I said I didn't get what all the backlash was about. She got death threats and seriously detailed descriptions of acts of violence thrown at her - she was like a lightning rod for frustrated, angry boys and men, and anyone who commented on anything close to her without matching their level of hatred got zapped along with her. "Well ackshually it's about ethics in video games" - well actually, it was a symptom of the hatred, fear, and intense desire for community that has informed and empowered alt-right hate groups and violence today. I'm glad that age and experience have smartened you up, and I hope you can pass that wisdom along to people in your circle of influence when you see hatred and toxicity in your day-to-day life.
Tropes was also very intro 101-level content. The followups people went to were what became “breadtube” and everything that’s happened after that. They had a podcast I used to listen to but it was nothing particularly special in a media criticism land that was becoming increasingly crowded.
It’s crazy to think all the GamerGate stuff happened a decade ago. It was terrifying as I was following a lot of the key players on social media from indie game podcasts/forums and seeing people have to run from their houses from 8chan/KiA trolls.
I’m not surprised she’s taking a break and she’s earned it. Go figure out the next chapter.
Part of this is because they pivoted into podcasts which often don't do well on the platform. FF's active viewership on YouTube is comparable to BehindTheBastards for example.
I’d consider 200,000 people who want to hear what you have to say a pretty big audience.
Sure there are people with bigger subscriber counts, but that’s still a lot of people.
It's more about the views than the members. It's the same issue that large but dead subreddits get where they have a lot of subs, but people have all but left, simply never choosing/remembering to unsubscribe.
200k subs with 3k views per new video premiere (<24 hours) is basically dead. a rapidly growing channel should have roughly 1:1 views to subscribers until 100k subs or so (assuming we're talking about edited videos, not stream archive), a channel at 200k subs should have at the bare minimum 20k views on a week old video.
That's a lot of people but isn't anything but a number for "I think this is neat" if it doesn't translate into views.
Which is yeah is relatively successful but maybe that doesn't mean it should be your fulltime job.
Is that a typical subscriber to view ratio? That's surprisingly low!
I don't think it's typical at all, I looked through a few of the content creators that I follow and have similar subscriber counts and most of their videos at least broke 100K and many of the videos far exceeded the subscriber count
Either she wasn't playing the game with the YT algorithm or her channel was shadowbanned because her videos were not being promoted
It's because it became a podcast channel with little visual flare. That's fine and all, but YT audiences don't respond well to that format. As counter example, Pod Save America at least video records their sessions (and does little clip inserts and stuff) so you can watch the podcast on YT if you want seeing real people versus just listening. Very few channels can get away with having a still frame for the majority of their runtime.
I never really watched her show, but I do remember when she was raising money for it and my word what a horrible time to be a woman on the internet. It really was bad out there, especially in gaming culture, and starting a show like that to respond to it at that time, in that space... I'll just say that I certainly couldn't've put myself out there like that. Absolutely no way.
On top of that, there were so many response videos and crypieces with thesis statements that could generally be summed up as "sexism is over: are women still whining about it because they're stupid, crazy, or manipulative?" with literally zero sense of self-awareness. So not only would we get harassed/insulted/abused, having the temerity to talk about the facts of our negative experiences would be used as fodder for more hostility.
I might go back and check a bit of the backlog, but honestly that period of time was so awful that I'm genuinely not sure if I could revisit it without getting at least a little upset. Even if the content is relatively anodyne, the context it started in was for sure not.
Honestly I'm surprised she lasted as long as she did.
"X is over, so why doesn't Y fucking shut up about it?!" Is the cornerstone of modern conservative thought, as someone who lives in a very Red state.
Literally last night at my job I had a conversation with someone who felt like black people are more racist than white people because he doesn't like the black guy at his job.
Because formal discrimination through laws and written policies is now illegal, these people believe racism, racial violence and discrimination have disappeared.
People treat it like ancient history or something when Ruby Bridges is still alive and 68 and she had to be escorted by the U.S. Marshals to get to school as a little girl for her safety.
Anecdotally, I know an interracial couple who had rocks thrown at them for holding hands in public. It's an extreme example but some people are hateful. Also Elon invited the nazis and hate mongers back onto twitter/x and they are very publicly recruiting and expressing their views right now.
It's always been the way a portion of the population feel about things.
Socrates lamented youngsters being rude, and for ignoring their elders.
There is plenty of written history from any given age, modern or historical, that shows people voicing this kind of attitude.
For me, that only makes me relax and remember that those voices will always be there. Life has moved forwards still. Always has, always will.
Just as surely as those opinions will exist, so will the voices that want change and betterment. The majority just plodding along will also be here. I take great comfort in that.
Assuming you're referencing that one quote that everyone does, it's not actually from Socrates.
In fact, Socrates was put to death specifically based on charges of inciting youngsters into being rude, impious, and for disrespecting their elders and the customs of the polis.
And, in the defense of the oldsters in Socrates' day who probably did harbor such complaints, the generation they'd have been complaining about would have been responsible for tearing Greek civilization apart in the Peloponnesian war and presiding over the erosion of Athenian democracy. So maybe they were onto something in the same way the Greatest Generation could have been onto something when they whined about the Baby Boomers.
Well, I stand firmly corrected on him then. Thank you!
I still think the sentiment is one that has been shown to exist at all times, though.
Since the last descending opinion was nuked I will add my two cents. The way this woman was treated was truely horrible, that said it is exactly the kind of response she was looking for. She is basically an Alex Jones type but for the left, she does not have the insight or knowledge of someone such as ContraPoints.
The ideas of her essays had merit, but were so painfully executed in such an obvious bias and reaching manner which is why she received the angry backlash she got. Does this justify the extreme reactions she received? No, but the polarization that was created was created because people that had real problems with the critique were lumped into the same group as the bigots and treated like shit for having an informed opinion. It became a topic you could not discuss just like the Last Jedi or The Last of Us pt.2.
In the end her contributions actually lead to less critique and less discussion, not necessarily intentional but that is the truth of the matter as I see it.
But in the end that is just my opinion.
Edit: Holy shit, you compare one poorly informed talking head to another and people lose there minds. Let me make this clear, Alex Jones is a much worse human being compare to Anita Sarkeesian. The similarities between the two are that they are both lightning rods of hate and defense, to the point that the majority of responses are people being offended on her behalf. With very few people actually wanting to have a discussion about her work. Which basically proves my point.
Do her ideas have merit but poorly executed, or is she an Alex Jones? These two seem mutually exclusive to me, as I can't think of a topic where Alex Jones has had reasonable ideas.
Did she receive angry backlash solely because she articulated her ideas poorly, or because she poked the bear of critiquing gender in games, a genre long perceived as a bastion of maleness? I find it difficult to believe this ballooned into the huge dramatic issue that it did over a misunderstanding about well-intentioned critics being lumped in with a minority of malicious actors. Maybe there was valid criticism to be had, but there always seems to be an awful lot of criticism of her as a person and not so much focus on her ideas whenever the topic comes up, and that speaks volumes.
As an aside, do you really believe she was looking for the horrible treatment she received? Why would anyone want that?
I use Alex Jones as an example of someone spouting poorly constructed and informed opinions and refusing to have any self reflection. I would never equate the opinions she holds to the truly despicable things he says. Honestly the right is so much worse then the left that it is hard to find someone that would equal Alex Jones in hatred.
As for the discourse around her, the reaction to my post kind of proves my point. If the opinion I stated had been about anyone else, I would not have to defend it to such an extent because it is such a tame opinion all things considered. But the discourse around this topic has turned so us vs them that if I look to be even an inch out of step I am presumed to be a monster instead of a individual with their own personal view of the situation.
And as for your question, I am speaking of validation. The negative and frankly bigoted reaction she got makes her feel justified in her view even though it was very poorly constructed. Again, this is the problem instead of talking about her actual work we talk about the discourse around her. No one has even asked about what in her work I dislike.
You're lamenting how it's impossible to discuss her work without it devolving into a meta-discussion about her. If you actually wanted that though, I'd have expected you to actually volunteer the constructive and specific critiques of her work up front without needing to be asked. Instead the discussion started off with an extremely inflammatory metaphor to one of the most despicable figures in online media. That comes across as more of a personal attack than an issue with the quality of her analysis.
If you don't like things being us vs. them, it's generally most helpful to keep things focused on concrete problems and specific facts rather than speculating about peoples' motivations or making declarative statements about their virtues or lack thereof.
I want to point out that the "inflammatory" metaphor was speaking of her work and how it has no value. My exact words were "She is basically an Alex Jones type but for the left, she does not have the insight or knowledge of someone such as ContraPoints." That statement is of her quality, not her character. This could have been a discussion about her work if you engaged with me about it, thankfully some are.
You've said both that her ideas have merit (which I interpret as having some value) but are poorly communicated and that her work has no value. Which stance are you actually arguing for and why?
If the first is true, why not just ignore her? If she has a point but isn't explaining well, move on to a different creator that does it better and let her fall out of your memory. If you think she's getting unwarranted attention why bring more attention to her by providing additional criticism? As far as I can tell, she's not spouting harmful ideas that require active resistance, just basic feminism.
(Not trying to dogpile here, I know you've been getting a lot of replies, just curious about some statements that seem contradictory and why there's so much passion about her if all she really did was be a mediocre content creator).
In short, she twists facts and lies about things to fit her narrative. She also has real fact and points in her videos, but when its mixed with lies you no longer are credible in my eyes.
I don't think the response you're getting proves that discussing Anita is impossible, I think it proves that comparing someone to Alex Jones is impossible.
Either I've missed Sarkeesian doing some truly horrific shit, or you're not fully informed of Alex Jones' actions.
This is not a viable comparison and it discolours an entire take.
I know true feminists who dislike Sarkeesian's content from her pre-gaming focused days when she was working primarily around feminist literature, and they found her lacking. I understand the notion that she's a mediocre voice who has been elevated to higher levels than many feel she deserves, from both a progressive feminist stance and from a far right insecure Gamer stance. But this only means the way one expresses their exact displeasure with her work is more important than usual.
The other "dissenting" opinion was not nuked because it was dissenting. It was because it was derisive and accusatory of something that doesn't actually make any sense with two seconds of thought, and the person demonstrated an attitude on the matter that read like a GamerGater. Other people have already pointed out the issues with their comments, and it is extremely charitable (and borderline disingenuous) to refer to it as being removed for being "dissenting" when it was just someone manufacturing outrage.
I use Alex Jones as an example of someone spouting poorly constructed and informed opinions and refusing to have any self reflection. As for the nuked comment, if they were really that terrible I apologize for seemingly defending them. All I was able to read is the responses which are just as accusatory as the ones I am receiving now for a opinion that is ridiculously tame.
I understand the opinion you were stating is fairly tame but the way it was expressed makes it seem not tame. Again, Alex Jones comparison really discolours the whole take. Even your description of his faults is much nicer than what he is actually infamous for and more commonly associated with.
When it comes to expressing an opinion on someone who is surrounded by false accusations and charges, precision of both connotation and denotation is more important than usual.
Lets make it clear then, fuck Alex Jones he is far worse of a human being. When I think of the right and crappy opinions his name was the first to pop into my head. I hope people can see how these kind of discussion can clearly push people into the waiting arms of one extreme or the other. I have an opinion on a woman that wrote a opinion peice, yet I am having to defend it like I'm a flat earther or some shit.
I think us all dog piling on you is a bit much as you're being forced to respond to several sets of comments, mine included, which is exhausting. But I just want to really point out that I don't think people are questioning your morality or thinking you like Alex Jones or something -- your original comparison itself presents him as a negative figure. You don't sound like a bad dude or anything to me, but that your negative reception here is a bit self-inflicted.
We're not critical of your relation to Alex Jones, but Alex Jones' relevancy as a comparison to Sarkeesian -- especially given how people have treated her (nightmare stuff) and how inflammatory and dare-I-say evil Jones is (even more nightmare stuff). You brought matches and gasoline to a dry forest and are upset a fire broke out.
do not apply to known trolls
There is nothing benign about Alex Jones and comparisons therein.
I feel this is falling into a common reddit anti-pattern: OP wants to express a point, uses a not perfect metaphor and the thread becomes about arguing about the metaphor. It's not very productive and gets off topic quickly.
I think the main point OP wanted to say is that Anita posted the video equivalent of flame bait, and while the ideas may have merit, the results were very much intended. OP used one idea of someone who posts flame bait. The subject isn't perfect but arguing over the metaphor takes away from the actual topic of flame bait (ironically enough).
I don't know if that speaks more to the audience that falls for it or the intentions of the creator, but no one's exactly made traction blaming the readers for falling for clickbait.
It's become about arguing the metaphor because the OP themselves kept arguing the metaphor. Don't accuse the audience of "reddit anti-pattern". We are not the ones doubling down on our clearly problematic rhetoric accusing other people of "losing their minds" while ignoring what everyone is saying.
I, and many others, attempted to explain to OP why the comparison was bad. I even went out of my way to express that I understood what the OP's more nuanced take was supposed to be twice but to tell them that their comparison is really, really, really bad and ruins their rhetoric. And they ignored it in favour of justifying about their poor comparison in yet another way.
If anyone here has demonstrated a reddit pattern, it is the person who is accusing everyone else of being wrong, making aggressive edits, and trying to hide the disingenuity as much as possible. Not a single one of the re-justifications from OP makes their comparison magically good enough to not take over their entire argument, and their edit only makes me wonder what their real goal is if they're sticking to such a problematic comparison despite all the backlash. Your idea of their point only makes me wonder about the disingenuity more because the idea that Sarkeesian was just trying to manufacture outrage was a GamerGate accusation in response to her actual content and it was falsely portrayed as such by that group for months.
I don't see why the OP is deserving of such charitability when they refuse to display any self-awareness or growth or willingness to improve their argument, only defensiveness and finger-pointing that it's everyone else's fault and not their own.
It takes two to tango, and at some point it's best to realize when something is going off the rails and re-focus. Don't assign blame, focus on results.
I don't care whose fault it is, and I only see irony in accusing OP of defensiveness and finger-pointing only to do the same when I point out issues with this conversation.
I'm not OP so I don't know their true intentions. Feel free to ask to clarify instead of assuming you know what they meant. Another common issue that leads to flame wars; focus on understanding, not debating.
I just want to point out the dark irony of you saying this while the accusation we're trying to fight against in here is the notion that Sarkeesian was disingenuous in her views, intentionally dishonest, or intentionally trying to stir trouble and backlash -- rather than the substance of the videos themselves which are banal and essentially harmless.
If you think her stuff actually counts as flame bait (which I'm not sure of from the conversation this far) then, well, shrugs. kfwyre's comment which is now the top comment is a far better bookend to this thread than anything I can write.
I'm just trawling this thread at this point -- so maybe I'm being a pest, but I just can't reconcile how these statements can be true
if you just watch like, the first episode of the Tropes vs. Women which is almost painfully dry in its dissection of the topic. Like others said, it's like an intro woman studies college lecture. That this is somehow the "Alex Jones of the left" is just silly to me.
Let's be real here, no one on the left is the equivalent of Alex Jones, the left is just factually not as shitty as the right is. That said, I am speaking about how they are similar in the way they have zero self reflection and have very poorly constructed opinions. However she absolutely has no equivalent to the stupidity of chemicals making frogs gay.
Lol my friend, you're the one the who made the comparison in the first place which invited a whole host of unnecessary distractions. As an aside there are indeed some really awful leftists, but at least in American discourse, they're not as common or popularized.
This is the important bit -- however -- can you elaborate on this? I linked a pretty representative example of her most popular work, and it comes across as pretty reasonable to me and even includes a bunch of cool little historical footnotes about game history (like how Ms. Pacman started out as a mod sold to arcade manufactures). She starts off the series saying:
I'm interested in what you consider to be lacking in self-reflection.
She very clearly twists items to fit the narrative she wants to build. I am trying to remember which video it was in, but to me the most egregious instance was her speaking of the video game Hitman and talking about how it promotes killing and desecrating strippers in a certain level. In reality, the game actively punishes you if you harm anyone that is not your soul target of the mission. She does this alot. Some of her points are valid, but that its mixed with obvious fabrications are why so many see her and her viewpoint as disingenuous.
Did a little snooping, here's the video: https://youtu.be/4ZPSrwedvsg?si=V92Dhvgk3KGVkZ6D
I've played every Hitman game (including the OG one which -- well isn't great) and "punishment" is just token. It's barely an inconvenience to kill NPCs for the most part as it's supposed to be a puzzle sandbox experience with few invalid ways to solve the puzzle unless you want Silent Assassin.
I mean, silent assassin is the perfect run and what most people who want to solve the puzzle aim for. You can say that having a lowered score is inconvenient, but it is literally grading you a worse player for doing so. With all that in mind, how is the game then promoting violence to those NPCs? It's not, its an open choice which is not how FF portrays it.
I finished watching the video and while I think some of her examples are a bit shoehorned, there's a kind of undeniable kernel of truth to her overall point of using sex workers as "window dressing" in lots of video games with bespoke interactions or dialog put in the game if you abuse them in some manner. Now all civilian NPCs are window dressing in these games at worst being a potential danger to your stealth, but it's telling how and why a game chooses its settings. This is about authorial intent.
Laser focusing on how "disincentivized" the player is from acting evil in say Hitman misses the forest for the trees especially when the explicit text of the game is clearly uninterested in having a nuanced take on female sexualization anyway and is instead going for titillation. I'm not saying Hitman: Absolution necessarily bad because of this, or people who like it are bad, but there's clearly accepted attitudes built into the game's DNA she's pointing out.
As I said, I believe she has some valid points but sandwiched between blatant misrepresentations. I believe in the same video she mentions GTA and how one of the few built in mechanics in the game are using prostitutes. This is an optional activity but the fact it is one of the only NPC interactions in the game it can be seen as sexist. That is something I agree with for the most part, but when she twists things to fit her narrative it basically makes me not want to engage with her content because it is already coming from a dishonest place.
As for the over the top titillation, that is something I would completely agree with. But that is something never brought up by her if I am remembering correctly. Her critique was game mechanic based, which basically shows why I think her critique is poor. But if you get value from her that is cool, you clearly see her essays are not bulletproof in all ways and I appreciate that and value your opinion because of it.
It's because she did not play the games she criticized, a point constantly lost in the vitriol of GamerGate. Imagine criticizing a movie you never actually watched... then making a Youtube channel about your criticisms.
She wasn't critiquing any specific game, she was critiquing well worn tropes in gaming as a whole with mentions to specific games for reference. Since it's a broad survey, there's obviously going to be specific stuff you only do a cursory glance of. If someone was out to critique Hollywood as an institution, it would be unreasonable to expect them to have watched every single movie Hollywood has ever put out before they're allowed to comment.
A lot of the GamerGate vitriol literally just seemed to be people not understanding how journalism or literary critique work, and applying standards to critique that are either basically impossible for anyone to execute fully or just non-issues.
I have a hard time believing that, any evidence to back that up? I always assumed she played the games but made the narrative as she saw fit.
Oh lord it's been literal decades since I engaged in some of this stuff, but others at the time had significant collections of evidence that she didn't play the games. She used screenshots and video from other youtubers instead of creating her own (and if I recall, she didn't credit these other creators), she got basic fundamental facts about the games wrong, and she rather publicly said that she didn't even like video games. These were the essential kernels of truth that got buried in mountains of sexist, misogynistic vitriol aimed at her.
IIRC (and again, so much of these is from literally a decade ago, so please forgive me if I misremember things) part of her Kickstarter was to purchase the games she was supposed to then play and critique. If she didn't even play the games, what was the point of raising money to purchase them?
I see your subtext here and want to make it abundantly clear: she did not deserve the backlash nor the death threats. Anyone who threatened her was 100% in the wrong, full stop.
The other comments I'm going to have go and Google around a bit.
First Edit: the quote I think my brain remembers is:
"I'm not a gamer, I don't like video games, they're all about blowing off each others heads, they're just gross. I actually had to learn a lot about video games in the process of making this"
Which is not only profoundly ignorant but a good demonstration of the bias she brought into her FF project.
Second edit:
The Hitman one is of course the primary one that everyone goes back to, and for good reason.
"One game that Sarkeesian accused of being sexist was Hitman: Absolution. She showed a segment when a player killed multiple strippers and dragged the bodies around."
As others have pointed out, the point of the Hitman games was to not kill the non-target NPCs. You actually have to go out of your way to kill multiple strippers in the game.
Additional edit, since I thought of it: She also didn't deserve the sexist, misogynistic insults towards her appearance and presentation either. Just wanted to put that out there.
Nice comment, but quick aside: The Hitman stuff she brings up in both her Tropes vs Women video series as well as some lectures she's given (though I can't remember which or where). As far as the video series is concerned (which probably had the most public exposure) you can find it here:
Or specifically this video if you don't want my commentary attached:
It's like 30 minutes long, though the Hitman stuff just makes up a few minutes of it.
IIRC, the main criticism feminists (not sure about Sarkeesian) had about sexism in Hitman: Absolution was that the game introduced a faction of female assassins dressed as sexy nuns.
In a way, Feminist Frequency ended up being an ideal target for this sort of nut-picking approach to character assassination because her videos are so elementary and dry that nobody wants to actually sit through them. The hate-watchers will, because hating on things is a self-rewarding behavior in the same way my dog feels very accomplished when he barks at the mailman. But feminists already suspect what she's saying, gamers aware of these social dynamics already know, and she wasn't saying much that was new or interesting so who else is gonna want to watch it?
You're combining two separate events. 'Ethics in games journalism' was in response to allegations that journalists were giving favorite coverage to developers they were involved with (romantically and otherwise) without disclosure.
The Antia stuff was primarily because she was a woman saying things on the Internet and also because her work misrepresented parts of games despite the games she referenced sometimes having more problematic content that was never brought up.
These are two things in vacuum, but they were absolutely related under the GamerGate umbrella as a unified cultural phenomenon especially during 2014-2015. The online hate mob had a rogue's gallery of villains (Batman style) and both these women endured the same abuse and harassment acutely over much of the same time period. The frankly mild criticism you could apply to both of them (which is debatable) was so thoroughly overshadowed by the vitriol of the event that it's hard for me to even bring that stuff up alongside it without feeling absurd.
I'm going to be upfront and say that I've watched Anita's videos and I've played Zoe's games and I don't care for either of them.
I'm also more critical of the journalism aspect than Anita's videos - as being the press generally means you should be impartial or just admit when you're not. Full disclosure, I work in a similar field and have covered projects that I have conflicting interests in and have always just made disclosure.
And, the big one, GameGate was such a completely unhinged wacko shack that it actually made me sad.
I'm not going to say that I'm sad to see FF go. Between that and CON and so many other initiatives that have appeared and faded away, I had honestly assumed FF had just floated away as well.
At the end of the day, you're correct that discourse around the events was entirely too toxic to touch even with rubber gloves. I think it's important to note the differences though. If we just say "GameGate was about hating women, end of story" we miss the subtilty that there are legitimate grievances in there to lure people in. And, unfortunately like Bannon said, if you bring them in with a grievance and the other 'side' simply vilifies them they'll double down to support you and the hooks are in. I'm paraphrasing him but that was, in my opinion, the meat of his strategy.
I don't really disagree with your overall point or anything, like even if we agree Sarkeesian's work is at best mediocre -- which I don't but will for the sake of argument -- what is so damned important about these specific grievances? Why can't a women just make something of 6/10 quality and endure the normal internet reaction towards mediocrity? Or more cynically, why is the "normal" reaction so evil? Clearly she, and others, tapped into something very ugly about our culture. Like, I understand the overall point, if you make the reasonable criticism "appear" taboo, you encourage people to vaguely side with #GG with bad actors hoping to claw them in deeper. But that perspective so utterly infantilizes men like we're unable to help ourselves get swept into hate mobs because 'oh no, she slightly got Hitman: Absolution wrong.'*
Maybe I'm just venting at this point, and I don't think my writing here is particularly coherent, but let me use a metaphor: If I make a tasteless joke (rude, uncouth, careless, obviously worthy of social critique) and their response is to beat me utterly senseless to an inch of my life and hospitalize me, is the situation in any way benefited from everyone rushing to say "We must discuss the tasteless joke or we'll encourage people to side with the brute!"?
That sounds nuts to me. It's so incredibly myopic. The small faux pas is nearly irrelevant at this point because the onus of the problem is clearly elsewhere. Anyway, I'm going to chill from this thread and watch Star Trek reruns instead.
*(ignoring the fact the window dressing point she's making is so obviously true in many games...)
Yeah, the Feminist Frequency part of the whole catastrophe was never really engaging to me and, frankly, allowed me to see the dirty side of the GameGate fiasco nice and early.
To your point, if you happen to walk into a predominantly black neighborhood and being making, as you called them, tasteless jokes about minorities in America and got your ass beat - would the context matter there? Maybe not for the fact that battery was committed against you but your actions would be taken into account during sentencing.
Being able to tell a person "I see why you arrived at this juncture but I believe you're going about this wrong." Is textbook de-escalation - but, it's also not your job to deradicalize every discord group online singlehandedly.
Enjoy your Star Trek! The less brainpower wasted on GG the better these days.
I don't want to get too bogged into arguing metaphors. I was just trying to convey how small things, even if legitimate, should not be used as a shield for obvious egregious wrongdoing. In the US at least "fighting words" are a thing, so your hypothetical involves bringing so in many disparate concepts, let alone that racial angle, we'll get nowhere.
My poison of choice is DS9. :)
Whether true or not, it's just plain bad critique and the heavy defense of it and the vitriol towards it are both unnecessary.
Opening such a brazenly incorrect statement with "let's be real here" is just an insult to the intelligence of anyone who reads this. As someone who holds no particular allegiance to either side of American binary politics and considers myself a pretty strict centrist I've seen some awful behaviour from either side of the aisle in the name of their political ideals, the key difference being that extreme liberalism is considered socially acceptable while extreme conservatism isn't. Alex Jones may have said some moronic shit that I would never agree with, but I've also heard extreme leftists preach their extreme ideals only to denigrate anyone who has an opposing opinion as a Nazi or other similar slander.
Nobody should be absolved of their shitty behaviour simply because their political cause happens to be the more socially-acceptable one at any given point in history.
Alex Jones currently owes over a billion dollars in damages for defaming school shootings victims. (Like, literally spreading conspiracies that they're all crisis actors and doxxing them, leading to the victims receiving death threats and having to leave their homes). Nobody on the left approaches that level of measurably reckless speech.
To be fair, no one popular on the left uses speech that recklessly. There are some truly terrible extreme left wing characters, but their reach is tiny, partly because they are not backed by wealthy business people.
Sure, no doubt (although thankfully I've never encountered left-wing people as toxic as Alex Jones -- probably because I spent my time here instead of Twitter). But their reach is an important distinction! It's what makes Alex Jones dangerous and not just someone's deranged uncle.
Does Alex Jones have wealthy business patrons? My impression is that he's just grifted off loons.
I can't speak to Alex Jones specifically, but Musk is currently replatforming hate mongers on Twitter/X. Fox publicizes spokespeople for hate frequently, so that is Murdoch backing. I am reasonably sure that there is more hidden backing as well. Organizations like the John Birch society back in the day always had business allies. Smedley Butler stopped the business plot, but the right is still backed by people who want to kill government regulation and entitlement//public benefits programs. Fomenting hatred is a tactic. It is not without purpose.
Edit https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The monetary value is irrelevant, he could have been ordered to pay 50 cents or a trillion dollars and it wouldn't change the impact his speech had. That being said (and as much as I would personally disagree with his views), if he wants to question the legitimacy of a national tragedy that's his prerogative, just like how people can claim to believe the earth is flat despite how counter-productive to collective education those claims may be. Doxxing victims with intent is another matter entirely if that's true, but I'm not super well-informed about Jones other than the fact that he's a pretty wild conspiracy nutter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/alex-jones-infowars-sandy-hook.html
You probably shouldn't speak to this case if you're not informed on it. It's extremely well publicized, you can hear dozens of hours of testimony for yourself if you like. I'm happy to send you links if that's something you'd be interested in. If you were informed on the case, you would know that he absolutely harmed these families and the monetary value of the compensation is absolutely significant and demonstrative of his negligence and malice both in defaming these families and in his conduct during the case.
I've read a fair few articles about his legal issues over the past year, I wasn't writing quite as literally as I usually do - what I meant was that I'm not super well-informed on the finer details like whether or not he doxxed any information about the victims that wasn't already publicly available. I don't watch his videos so I also don't know whether or not he actually incited harassment against the families in a literal sense, ergo whether or not he should be held liable for the actions of others.
As for your "if you were informed you would know" statement, the monetary value is truly irrelevant. Some Sandy Hook survivor families might see the ordered damages as not enough while others might see them as far and above what they were expecting, and that inherent subjectivity is the proof that a monetary value awarded by a court cannot possibly represent damage to a person's livelihood, health or well being. On top of that there are any number of confounding factors during a trial that would affect the outcome of damages, which could be as simple and transient as the mood of the judge and jury on the day of ruling.
Most importantly, and the point I made in my earlier comment, the legal damages are irrelevant because no dollar amount can change what the victims' families had to go through. The nature of immeasurable damage to a family's wellbeing is very self-explanatory.
Unlike the others hyperfocusing on the Alex Jones comparison, I get what you're saying. Sarkeesian lacked the scholarly rigor that she clearly wanted, and that others will claim she had, but it's impossible to even have that discussion without it devolving into the vitriol that surrounded her. I wish nothing but the best for her and hope she finds peace and quiet in her life post-FF, but I can't say that FF brought anything resembling "good discourse" to the internet.
If anything it was what lead to large companies using it to advertise their products. The all female GhostBuster movie that became a lightning rod being a perfect manufacturered example.
I've watched some of her essays. To me, they seem well researched. She uses lots of examples from multiple games to make a point that is relevant and cogent . Most commentary videos restrict their focus to a single body of work. That's a problem when making generalizations.
Comparing Sarkeesian to Alex Jones is so profoundly wrong, and on so many levels, that I'm at a loss as to how to respond. I can only assume that you are being extremely biased and unfair, and I'm not sure why. I'm not exactly angered or "triggered"... But I am baffled and concerned. That's the most absurd take I've read in quite a while.
Ok, but I am a GenX woman. I have thoroughly enjoyed big games including DragonAge 1 2 and 3, Mass Effect 1 2 and 3, The Witcher 3, Skyrim and more. I hate hate hate Candy Crush. Am I not to ask the game companies to also consider me and my needs/desires in games?
Has Bethesada, Bioware, or CDPR not had considerations to your needs/desires? I get the general point, but you chose games known for their blank slate characterizations with a character who's gender you can switch. There is some male assumptions despite that, but they seem to be trying to make stories that don't strongly consider gender as a result of that choice.
Also interesting because all of those series excep Witcher have been semi-dormant. Skyrim is 2011 Dragon Age 3 is 2013, and Mass Effect Andromeda is 2012. I imagine any new entry will be about as similar to those entries as God of War 3 is to God of War (2017).
It's funny that you state this because Feminist Frequency actually has a whole video where a male character is viewed as the default, or canonical, version, but there is an option to play as a female character. I remember noting this when I played KOTOR that although I played as a female character, the "canon" player character is considered male.
It was my impression that the video series was about how those tropes in video games were harmful, regardless of whether or not the games were targeted towards men.
Perhaps, but I don't see what much can be done in the short term. Yes, in the meta sense, these are scenarios written by humans, and most game developers even in 2023 are male. In addition, story for these blank slates aren't going to micro-optimize every little piece of dialouge based on the chosen gender. Devs make these kinds of sandboxes to cut corners, not to try and capture everyone's experieces.
That's part of the problem with why I don't like too many WRPGs. The ones I love focus on the environment and have excellent worldbuilding around the character, instead of making the world feel like it stops the moment the character leaves town. But for character centric ones, when you try to target everyone you just get mush.
Long term, there could be some mmore cultural shifts, maybe even large budget studios with a majority women employed to make such titles. But I question if the end result of slightly less biased blank slates is a goal to aspire too over a more bespoke character to give their exprience with. I'd rather have more Abby's and Aloy's than flesh out Femshep just a little more (I'm fine with more male romance options in future Mass Effect games though).
I actually agree with you, but I'm confused about the relevancy to the original topic. I believe that the Feminist Frequency video I linked was specifically advocating against "blank slate" characters. Sure, they're probably going to be inevitable (nor do I think it is impossible to do them well), but I would absolutely prefer a story built around a specific, well-written character.
But I believe the original comment topic had been around the idea that it's OK for the tropes discussed by Feminist Frequency to exist in "big blockbuster AAA games" because they are targeted towards men. I think there are a number of implicit assumptions here.
@grumbel writes:
Implicit is the idea that the tropes discussed by Feminist Frequency are not worthy of criticism because they are games written for and targeted towards men. I've stated above that I think the entire point of the series was to demonstrate that these tropes are inherently harmful.
There is an assumption made by the industry (and frankly a lot of male gamers) that AAA games are targeted towards men because women aren't interested in AAA games.
@boxer_dogs_dance then replies that that assumption is false, as she is interested in AAA games.
The idea is that the assumption that women aren't interested in AAA games, therefore the games should be targeted towards men is backwards. AAA games are first and foremost targeted towards men, therefore women are less interested. The popularity or industry size of mobile/casual games is neither here nor there.
It could be suggested that the Feminist Frequency videos explore why women aren't interested in AAA games. I actually think her goal is far broader; she is simply making informative videos about harmful tropes in video games. That's it! It's an attempt to educate folks who play video games about what tropes they might be exposed to without their awareness, as well as discuss how and why these tropes contribute to sexism and toxic masculinity. There is of course the hope that these discussions can then change the game industry. I do think the AAA industry actually is becoming slightly more aware of these factors; the number of games with well written female protagonists has certain increased over the years. Progress is slow, as you pointed out.
To bring it back, you asked:
The answer is, of course, no. And there are folks in this thread that seem to believe that that is OK because there is a different industry that does target women. That doesn't make much sense to me.
Let me know if I misinterpreted anyone's comments.
The fact that I am now too busy to game is beside the point.
The claim that I was responding to was that women prefer casual games and that serious or hard core or violent games are male territory. Witcher 3 is primarily Geralt's story and features female but not male sex workers in the brothels. But honestly nitpicking this is not worth it. There are a couple of answers in this thread marked exemplary. If you haven't read them yet, you could do that. I'm done with this topic.
I never mentioned that.
With all due respect, an anectode doesn't disprove a mass statistic. There's little point arguing about what everyone thinks, and honesty its not very productive to compartmentalize games by genre and medium on a topic this general to begin with. People like or don't like what they like.
So I wanted your personal experience on what you feel (or felt) games you seem to otherwise enjoy are misssing. But if you are done here, I apologize if I offended you.
I am literally about to leave and be offline for several days. Also talking as a woman in the context of a conversation about how another woman was so thoroughly persecuted is deeply depressing and hard emotional work.
You criticized my example games as older and no longer relevant, so I explained why that is still my context for gaming. I am not confident that you want to understand but I am confident you want to be seen as the winner of this large discussion. I hope we all can grow/benefit from using Tildes. Deimos and cohort have fostered a very interesting online experiment in civil conversation that I value.
I simply took it as your favorite or most played games. Fallout New Vegas is my favorite game I'd still use it in the context of modern game discussion.
It's a real shame even Tildes is falling victim to this mentality. I just wanted to ponder what a 2020's era elder scrolls (i've given up on Fallout 5 being out this decade) or Mass effect would be like after being absent for a decade, given how games like God of War managed to reinvent themselves after being similarly targeted, or how devs like Guerilla transitioned from stuff like Killzone to Horizon.
Instead I end up seeing why "gamergate" is the only tag I have filtered out on this site. responses I get can barely even assume good faith despite me being here for some 6 years because of very old turf wars I've long abandoned (and avoided even in my reddit days). I'm here to seek and see others' experiences, there's nothing to "win" except knowledge and hopefully a wide world view.
I simply found it interesting how all your mentioned entries are pre-Gamergate and wonder how it would be affected over a decade after that drama. I imagine it would change for the better, but who knows? Oh well, nothing ventured, life lessons and all that. This will be my last response in this post, my apologies.
It's not a "mass statistic". That's the whole problem. It's a false premise borne from a misunderstanding of what the studies actually show. I invite you to read my comment on this factoid.
The same thing you describe as an "anecdote" is actually in line with the "mass statistic" in the study. The person you were trying to convince is wrong is actually a good microcosm of the study's actual findings.
I never said it was the correct statistic, and to be frank I don't care to look up the correct mass statistic. I used "mass" in the classical sense of "this is a statistic based on a study trying to extrapolate to a large population", not "this is a popular, well understood, and accepted statistic". I don't think we have too many of those in gaming, unfortunately.
I already responded to them, and stated my intentions. You seem to have misconstrued my goal in making that comment, and I apologize if I was vague.
Keep in mind, though, that this was some time ago and it was not the giant that it is now. Candy Crush Saga, for instance, was still pretty new.
I didn’t say it didn’t exist, just that it was much much smaller.
But it wasn't. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and launched in 2011, and it's friend Terraria is another top 100 best selling game. Wii sports is similar. Pokemon is a constant industry leader, especially when it launched. Tetris, pacman, and all the other arcade classics are still some of the best selling games of all time. For a brief period Guitar Hero/Rockband were the records to beat.
Over and over again there are so many examples of well made games that are not targeting male markets leading the industry charts. It makes sense as obviously they have a larger pool of people who will buy the game.
Those are not (or were not yet) mobile or casual games, though. And we call games like Tetris and Pokemon casual retroactively; they were not considered to be that at the time.
Minecraft also wasn't a huge success all at once; it took years before it became the best selling game of all time.
You can name popular series all you want, but if even half of the games released featured misogynist tropes, wouldn't it still be a huge problem?
I honestly don't want to go any further arguing about this, so I'm going to make this my last response on this particular matter.
Having lived through the second and my father living through the first, this is just not true. They were absolutely considered "casual". Tetris because it was one of the first games the "casual" computer user was playing and Pokemon because the "casual" schoolkid loved it.
Hell in both cases there wasn't that much outside the "casual" market. Being into SF2 or Quake was your "serious" gamer and it was vanishingly small compared to things like pokemon.
I'm going to break my promise here because I can't help but nitpick.
This is because the meanings behind those words have changed. Pokemon and Tetris were casual in that they were something you could pick up and enjoy a short bout of them. But they existed in a time before "casual" was made into a metagenre. It was also a time when people were a lot less serious about video games overall and they were just considered to be fun diversions mainly for kids (it was literally made for a system called "Game Boy"), so the "casual" descriptor was essentially redundant.
By that logic, no analysis is valid unless it is an analysis of the entirety of a medium. Suppose I wish to analyze films released in the theater in the US, would you say my analysis is invalid because I didn't include movies released on streaming? Or Bollywood movies? Or tv series? Or novelizations? Or comic book tie-ins? Or published screenplays?
That is not how research works, it is valid for an analysis to include Call of Duty, but not Candy Crush.
It is still an analysis, and Sarkeesian's videos are remarkably well researched, with way more concrete examples and identifed citations than any other videos about videogames I have seen. It is not possible to do cultural analysis without selecting a corpus, as an analysis of the totality of games is unfeasible. You may disagree with her conclusions. But her work follows sound academic practices and there's no reason whatsoever to dismiss it outright.
Objections such as yours are quite perplexing, given the tremendous rigour and superiority she shows when compared to almost all commentary about video game culture on YouTube. I gotta be honest, I truly have no idea what you're talking about. Such statements do not match the actual videos at all.
You are misunderstanding why there is a split, and therefore have a false litmus test.
Every study I've seen on this comes with the caveat that the split is only because some genres are designed for men for the most part and the few entries that try to appeal to women see an "unusually" high amount of female players.
This Quantic Foundry study was the most recent prominent gaming by gender study and their conclusions do not support your idea that there are natural male and female genres, but that there is a huge wasted opportunity in many genres to appeal to a wider female audience. Exceptional games within these genres that did appeal to women found they had a much higher female playerbase than games like Dudebro Powerfantasy #53452.
The whole premise of Feminist Frequency was to focus on these traditionally male genres and find out why they are not appealing to women (believe it or not, a pretty common complaint among female gamers who do want to play more AAA FPS games and racing games), and you are effectively suggesting here that the problem with FF is that they didn't "stay in their lane" by sticking to "traditionally female" genres so that they wouldn't have anything to complain about.
To paraphrase someone earlier in this comment chain: that's not much a response when you ignore all the stuff that contradicts your point and only cherry pick the genres that confirm it.
Besides, it should not take a lot to figure out why the lack of a "W" in every sports franchise name since the 80's might have led to this.
If you watch her videos attentively with an open mind, you will notice that her claims are way more nuanced and sophisticated than your characterization.
Your objection shows a misunderstanding of what her videos are meant to accomplish. I don't think it is advisable to answer a question that assumes a flawed premise :/
Do you have any specific, concrete criticisms about her work other than the Hitman example?
I'm not the person you're replying to, but her framework is based on generally outdated views of psychology/sociology. She's not 100% wrong but at the same time there's some level of the same logic used to argue that violent video games cause violence, which has time and time again been proven to not be true.
She will often dismiss/ignore/leave out evidence contrary to her claims, and it's really just hard to take everything she says at face value when you ignore/hand wave such things. There's also the way she presents evidence to sometimes imply things that aren't known as fact?
I think her overall goal is correct, and she's probably sincere about her efforts, but I too often feel she's working backwards from her conclusion, which is annoying because I don't think it's that far from the truth and it's absolutely important to talk about.
I can't speak about her Feminist Frequency channel as a whole, but if you're talking about her most divisive series, it was titled "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". Evidence contrary to her claims would have been irrelevant, since those would not be tropes by definition.
I'll back up what @Genuinely Crooked was saying; concrete examples of specific claims would be much more helpful than generalized concepts.
I'm sure they would, but frankly, I don't really relish the idea of digging up examples of something I last looked into 5+ years ago, and were generally not enjoyable to discuss then. Especially when so many things have been removed or retold and it's digging through hours of footage and then having to dig up the papers she cites.
Which as another red flag to me the fact she doesn't often link papers or mention their name, just quote them, is something I will always see as distastefully impersonating research rather than actually doing it. They are real papers and real conclusions, but it's much much harder to research when you're just digging into "papers claim blah...".
In short, I think it's quite obvious where she's bending her logic to work backwards or taking 2 true things and connecting them in a way that isn't necessarily true, but I also really don't relish the idea of doing yet another research paper style dive into her. If you enjoy her content or disagree, that's great, and i'm not interested in convincing you otherwise.
You're talking about a real person here, though. It's one thing to use generalizations about half-remembered events, but it's highly unethical to speak badly about someone about something that they may or may not have done.
There is no may or may not to me. She did do these things. It's 100% apparent to me at almost any point in her videos. If you disagree that's fine but I don't owe you, or her, another dissertation on why, especially years after the fact.
Again, the simple fact that other people don't even see this as an issue and are asking for references, to me, just says that they don't view her material the same ways as I do. That's fine. I already pointed out her inability to cite sources and I think that's pretty concrete. If you think it's unethical to get tired of an old conversation then so be it, but I'm also not going to just watch as some people pretend as if there aren't problems with the way she presents information.
You are strongly misrepresenting the point I am trying to make.
You have made the claim "person has done bad thing", but you have not actually demonstrated that they have done such a thing. Weather intentional or not, that's character defamation.
None of us here were present for your previous conversations. You're the one who brought this up. You did mention her not citing sources, and that's great, but you then jumped immediately into "bending her logic to work backwards or taking 2 true things and connecting them in a way that isn't necessarily true". You "yada yada"-ed out of the most important parts!
If you were tired of the conversation and weren't willing to cover your bases, the most reasonable thing to do is to not participate in the conversation.
and
are me doing exactly that, and you're not even engaging on that.
No, no it is not. This is inherently exclusionary and silences a ton of valid voices who don't want to do the work again and again. There are a million arguments about public figures that have been argued to death. This is not some person only I and a few others have met, nor is this some new revelation. The sides of this conversation have been repeated ad nauseam over and over. If you want to research it on your own you're more than welcome to. Me offering a dissenting opinion of something so over discussed does not require I defend every scrap of statement otherwise I must be silent.
It is perfectly valid, especially with dogmatic topics such as this, to point out that there are shades of grey to the black and white picture people like to paint, and those who find that interesting can validate themselves. If someone were genuinely interested in a history on this and I was discussing in person i'd more than gladly dig up old discussions and examples, but being told I'm "defaming" someone in this case is absurd, and shows exactly why people like me don't want to discuss it, because to do anything less than what you want leads to me somehow violating a rule you've created.
I've explained over and over what my problems are with your statement, and it appears that you still don't understand it.
I have engaged with your claim of her not citing sources. I have explained how that's not the part that I had problems with. If it isn't clear, I agree with you in that it's problematic, but as I have already said multiple times, that is not enough to justify your other statement which I quoted you verbatim so that you would understand exactly what I was trying to address, which you have yet to actually respond to. You are the one who is failing to engage with me.
In no world would I consider my comments as trying to silence you. If I were trying to do that, I'd just be tagging your comments as malice in hopes of getting your comments removed. I'm just trying to get you to provide an intellectually honest defense of your own statements. If you had just said "I don't like this person", I would have left it at that, but you didn't do that. You didn't make an "I" statement, you made a "she" statement; you were making an accusation about the things she did. I'm just asking you to be responsible for that.
I'm sorry that you feel like I've attacked you somehow. I've made every attempt to avoid coming across as hostile, but apparently that was not enough. In any case I have given up all hope of you ever engaging with my questions and am far too frustrated with your responses to continue to engage with you any further. Have a good evening.
I don’t want to add to the dogpile, but I really think you should give kfwyre’s comment a read, and strongly consider the points he brought up. They are incredibly relevant to your comment, and also explain the response you received.
Maybe English isn't your first langauge or you're using speech-to-text, but it's "dissenting opinion".
I would imagine that it was just a typo.
but a typo is not generating another, correctly spelled, different word with multiple different letters.
this is a typa.
this is knott.
Yes, but if it's a typo that lead to autocorrect inserting the wrong word, then I'm still technically correct. 😉
i suppose you could be theoretically correct for some circumstances.
Can you really say that about closing something down after 15 years? That seems far too uncharitable a take. Geeze, the world might be a better place if people stuck to things for well over a decade before "moving on to the next thing" more often.
All that drama was 15 years ago??? Damn.
FF was around for a while before the hate-train really got going -- so more like 10-11 years ago which is when the first Kickstarter she held blew up.
Ok, yeah, that sounds closer to where I remembered it
This type of malicious response works well on other forums. We can do better here.
Do you have a reliable source for the claim that Sarkeesian was taking an unreasonably salary out of FF? Frankly, I find it hard to accept claims like "Feminist Frequency was intentionally stoking drama," when all they did was produce extraordinarily milquetoast feminist criticism of games that wouldn't be out of place in a 300-level college course, and as a consequence were the subject of an intense, right-wing social media storm that was laden with grossly violent rhetoric and to some extent still persists to this day. If you'll forgive my skepticism, a lot of negative comments about the organization and its founder seem to come more from long-held grudges and petty grievance than anything material.
I hate to have to say this on Tildes as it generally doesn't have this problem, but you're not going to get a good faith response. OP's comment is a literal time capsule of 2014 of #GG talking points. Let's break down each bit:
OP's comment is a cliche, an utterly thoughtless regurgitation. That none of the above is true is irrelevant.
Sadly Tildes isn't immune to misogyny. It's not as prevalent as elsewhere on the internet, but I've noticed a few misogynistic comments recently that were removed shortly after. Glad to see it isn't tolerated, but still sad to see other Tildes users spout that kind of bigotry, especially when you look in their history and see quality contributions on other topics.
Do you have evidence of this, or are you repeating talking points you heard elsewhere?