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mickilennial
The Most Trusted Name in News


Gender: Female
Age: 35
Location: Detroit
Poland

  • #91
  • Posted: 05/30/2015 17:16
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Necharsian wrote:
I don't think the argument that GTA is sexist is because you can kill women, but more that all women in the game are just meaningless objects. and the ones you can interact with are just for fucking.


I do not remember fucking Amanda, in fact all I remember is the relationship despite it being conflicted getting better throughout the entire game.

Except GTA5, whilst not a perfect game does try to dissect characterization of a complicated marriage and family life of Michael De Santa and I will say that despite his wife’s hypocrisy and double-standards she doesn’t exist as an object to be oogled or murdered; hell, I personally found myself curious about which way the marriage issues were going to turn by the end of the game. I could go into detail about a lot of this when I have the time – but this is like the Hitman incident where we are told by the “critics” that it’s sexist and misogynistic when it really isn’t in the way they are thinking. Is there weak female characters and object NPC’s? Mostly in GTA, sure.
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SquishypuffDave



Gender: Male
Age: 33
Australia

  • #92
  • Posted: 05/31/2015 05:01
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@Happymeal (obvi)

To address a few things:

I'm not a fan of people using manipulative and deceitful tactics in order to further an agenda, and if that is the case with some of the articles in question then it isn't cool. I'm with you there.

I think it's probably the case that a person who disagrees with the agenda would be more inclined to believe there's a journalistic conspiracy, and that a person who agrees with the agenda would be less inclined to believe in a journalistic conspiracy. People are emotional beings, especially people that believe they are purely rational beings.

As I said, I don't see any conflict between having an ideology and being open to change. You accused the feminist movement of making premature judgments and not being evidence-driven, I guess my gut reaction to the gamergate movement involved some of the same doubts.

It's difficult to separate the anger about journalism ethics from the anger about the agenda the articles serve, or from some of the more personal hatred directed toward specific women. I haven't seen any gamergate-supporting articles from people that are a fan of feminism, which makes me suspicious. The fact that gamergate harassment has fallen almost exclusively upon women is also suspicious.

I also want to clarify that I don't think games are uniquely sexist. It's just that I don't think games are uniquely unsexist. I don't see sexism as a defamatory label, I see it as a system that everyone naturally internalizes to some extent, including myself.

Happymeal wrote:
Gamers are people who have an interest in gaming. By alienating that audience, you create a new audience that has very little allegiance to gaming. The point is, the reason people are buying games is because they have an interest in them. Games which already adhere to the idea of inclusion (having strong female protagonists or whatever) are still not constantly purchased by non - gamers which means people stating this must want to change the medium to a different one all together. This is because every effort that is possible without changing the medium in order to garner the non - gamer audience has been made. Perhaps a few new genres can pop up or different stories, but games have already created enough that caters to different audiences that stating "we should bridge the gap between gamers and non - gamers" is insane. It has already been done without actually changing the medium




Since you're a fan of giving the audience what it wants, doesn't it make sense to listen to the sizable portion of gamers who are female and want to see themselves represented? The point isn't that games should be marketed to people who aren't interested in gaming, it's that they should acknowledge that people who play games come from all walks of life.

Two definitions of "gamer":
1. A person who plays games.
2. A person who plays games and is therefore from a hypermasculine outsider subculture.

The "death of gamers" thing is about the death of the second definition, because it doesn't represent the reality. The gap being bridged between "gamer" and "non-gamer" is about the dissolution of that second definition. The scare quotes are there for a reason. Nobody needs to try to bridge that gap; it's already bridged. Some people just seem to have an outdated perception of what it means to be a gamer, and the articles are trying to spread that news.

Happymeal wrote:
If the gaming industry is sexist because it doesn't have enough female protagonists (which is the gist of what I'm hearing here) and that too many female NPCs are treated poorly, then how is that not stating "a male oriented game is therefore sexist".


Because you just implied that men can't enjoy games with female protagonists, and that they can't enjoy games that don't treat their female NPCs poorly... Did you actually mean to write that?

Also, you're conflating broad trends with individual products. Even if I were to accept your premise, the argument isn't logically sound

Also, the gist of what I've been saying isn't really about how it's bad that games geared toward men usually have male protagonists. That's not particularly troubling. I guess the most relevant aspect I could direct your attention to would be empowerment. Women being endowed with agency vs women being passive or powerless. Women doing things vs women having things done to them. I think if you were to compare male and female minor characters through this lens, you'd very quickly notice a discrepancy. I find it very unlikely that this has anything to do with marketability.

Happymeal wrote:
It's odd how when you criticize something it's about elevating the medium or about trying to make it better or art or whatever, but when I criticize something, I just can't handle criticism.


I don't remember where I said this, you'll have to remind me. I don't think I ever meant to give that impression about you personally.

Happymeal wrote:
I call it bullshit because every criticism made seems to either be attempting to make a quota or just plain out stupid.


Here's an allegory. It's not a perfect allegory, but it might be of some use. Imagine that in every videogame, all the characters are anthropomorphic apples. Then some gamers start writing articles saying "Why is every character an apple? There's no good reason for all these characters to be apples." Then a bunch of other gamers get angry and write back "All my favourite games have apples! You can't force game designers not to use apples!" Then the apple-questioners write back "That's fine, but people like lots of different fruit. It would be better if there was more variety." Then the applegaters are like "You can't enforce quotas, you shrill joyless SJW, why can't you just relax and enjoy these apple games. I don't enjoy games because of who is and isn't an apple. Apple games are what sell because apple-questioners are a niche market." Then the apple-questioner is like "You don't have to be an apple-questioner to enjoy non-apple games. There's a huge banana audience that play apple games because that's just what's there." Then the applegater is like "Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. I was never threatened after all." Then they all laugh and hug.

Happymeal wrote:
And, to top it off, everything is sexist if it doesn't adhere to the ideal.


Well, I mean, if the ideal is "not being sexist", then it follows that things that don't adhere to that ideal are sexist. I guess you were thinking of a different ideal?

Happymeal wrote:
However, when journalists create a background communication in order to push this agenda (look up the game journo pros list), that's when the line is crossed. I'm fine with idiotic criticism, I'll argue against. However, action needs to be taken when media falls under such a bias that it's actively pushing this idea while being organized to do such.


That's cool then I guess. I had thought that part of the gamergate movement was about opposing social criticism in video game reviews.

I'm also a bit of a pleb so when I see the wikipedia page and it's a wall of references all saying that the journalism ethics accusations have found to be "broadly debunked, ... trivial, based on conspiracy theories, unfounded in fact, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics in the industry", I can't help but be a little bit convinced by it.
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Saoirse





  • #93
  • Posted: 05/31/2015 10:39
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Im going to go ahead and move past focusing on GTA cause that's not leading the conversation anywhere productive, so Im just going to go ahead and state that like every single medium it is a very good thing when people get active and actually get upfront with what they perceive as troubling trends with the art they love. It forces the industry and the creative talent to actually confront, with a fresh set of perspective, not only what they're doing but what message they're sending across to their outside audience, and can actually work to bring in new voices to how the games are made & produced and break out of their shell that can grow over time, and overall keeps the industry from getting static or just too plain insular. The problem is the gaming industry have been masters of using the "LA-LA-LA-LA" approach when it comes to adressing the issues and concerns certain gamers bring up, and if it truly wants to grow as an art form it can't refuse new, outsider-but-not-really ideas and viewpoints for all eternity.

And yes often the problem with the gamer-gate is that it's far more based on personal attacks than openly adressing the issues from Sarkeesian and those who share her views brought up and whether or not there should be changes in how games deal with their female characters and the issue of the little female voice there is in the modern gaming industry, especially considering they now make up nearly half of the gaming audience. Not to mention the fact that yes it can be a challenge for certain companies in the gaming industry to all of a sudden change it's culture and actually take more viewpoints that until now we're rarely given consideration and using different perspectives to give their products, their art if you will, a much wider reflection of the world around them- but it can give games a much richer, challenging experience for their audience and actually forces them to get out of their comfortable, static view of how games should automatically work and what messages they should promote.

And if you want to pretend there isn't a sexist-based vitrol to a lot of the gamer-gate responses, look at what was said to Sarkeesian and to what was said to male colleagues who echoed or supported a lot of her views; both negative (though the tone and volume, to the surprise of nearly every non-gamer-gator, was very very much lower when responding to the latter), but only one's personal gender, and how it somehow "represented" everybody who happen to share her biological sex, was made a pointed and heated issue.
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