So, for some people here, playing a video-game mission in a STRIP-CLUB, filled with criminals and STRIPPERS is misogynist. Cause you know, STRIPPERS are strangely lightly clothed and that is, de facto, awfully misogynist...

Incarnating a fictional hitman who can drag the bodies of his potential victims, man or woman alike, is, in fact, some sort of morbid glorification of dead sexualized female bodies for the brutish males. Dragging corpses is part of the base mechanics of the game, but, hey, let's interprate this in a twisted sexist paranoïd way.

Excessively broadening some terms (like misogyny) so that they magically designate "everything that I find misogynist", interpreting everything through the oversimplified prism of oppressive men/oppressed women, considering flawed "studies" filled with data manipulation as valid ones...

Yeah, sounds about right...

Bingo! It's a troll! You'll never get a straight up common sense answer from it.

Here's the real problem...
When you start looking for something, you are going to find it.
I watch a fair amount of football.
Fans of the two teams can watch the same game and if you ask the fans of one team how fair the refs were to their team, they'll almost always tell you the refs were out to get their team. This is because they remember all the bad calls that went against them, but forget about any that might have favoured them.

The same thing applies here. When you go looking for sexism, you find it, but how often will you find reverse sexism if you look for it?

If you are going to make the claim the damsel in distress is an overused trope, you need to quantify it. What percentage of games? I've heard many people claim its a majority. Majority means over 50%. Are you honestly telling me this trope is in over half the games? Seriously? Try counting them. Take 20 games at random, show me 11 with that trope...

This reminds me of some of the ridiculous claims made by feminists in the 70's and 80's.
Such as 150,000 young girls dying every year of anorexia because they feel the need to look thin in order to attract the attention of men. Gloria Steinem quoted it. Naomi Wolf as well, calling it a "holocaust" "caused not by nature but by men". (Because clearly men are making young women starve themselves, women can't be responsible themselves...) Ann Landers used the figure in a column and many more.

The CDC had numbers. 1983 there were 101 deaths attributed. 67 in 1988; 54 in 1991. It's this sort of blatant exaggeration and poor research which perpetuates these myths.

This is why I call for actual numbers and not some page where a bunch of people are going out of their way to find anything that can be construed as sexist in video games. Honest research with an effort to remain unbiased...

In the example I used in a prior post, how many people are calling all 1 billion + Muslims violent because they can name 20-50 Muslim terrorists.
So, people can cherry-pick sexist examples out of and list what 50-100 instances out of 10's of thousands of video games...

Confirmation bias at its finest. This is why people like Dan Olsen aren't academics, they just spout smart-sounding speech while convincing people not to dig any deeper. I can't believe we're in an age when people would still take completely unknown faces entirely on good faith instead of wanting to actually see the evidence. People wanted GG as a reason to hate gamers, not professing that they already hated gamers to begin with.

People aren't taught to be analytical or self-critical. That's the reason we're in this mess. "Can't profess that I screwed up as a journalist because it would deflate my self worth!". "Can't try to be a better journalist because my friends told me that minimal effort is TOTALLY journalism!".

To whom? Everything she's done so far has been beneficial to herself. She has achieved massive financial gain, fame etc.. That anything but her honest opinion "wouldn't be of any use" is simply wrong. The naiveté of her followers ist just adorable.

Anyway, let's pretend for a second that she does believe the stuff she says and it's worth analyzing it: the strippers in Hitman. First off: she acknowledges exactly one (1) possible intention behind their inclusion in the game and presents exactly one (1) possible effect they may have on the player. In her video she presents it as clear that the dead stripper's body you inevitably find is supposed to give you some sort of sexual satisfaction and some even more perverted non-sense about mutilating her body etc.. She does not even acknowledge the option that a dead woman, dressed in a manner that is normally supposed to be arousing, ditched in a dark and dirty corridor is in fact a disturbing image which will actually have the opposite effect of what she says in the video.

More importantly she blatantly ignores the fact that the strippers actually have dialogue which humanizes them. That dialogue creates more sympathy for them than for any other character, excluding Diana and the girl, throughout the entire game - heck, I can honestly say that I actually felt more sympathy for the strippers than any other character, including the most important ones. Really. You get glimpse at the background of these women, how they feel, who they are. They are presented as victims of their environment. You actually get a bit of social commentary there. Does Anita even recognize this? No. Does she see the option that the developers invented the entire strip club scenario with sexually abused women to point to a real-world problem, making the developers actually kinda be on Anita's own side? No. Does she *at least* look at it in the context of the entire series which has been presenting the criminal underworld in many many different ways for almost fifteen years and delivering satire and social commentary many times? No.

And yet another highly important thing is that Anita fails to see a difference between the player and the avatar, an issue seriously discussed by game designers and actual game critics and analysts and which has recently become even more widely discussed due to the inclusion of a first person perspective in GTA V (which many say changes *everything* about the game and also has an impact on the ethical implications of enjoying that game). Screw the fact that not everything Agent 47, a fleshed out character with traits no sane player can identify with, does, is something the player wants him to do or enjoys. Screw the fact that a player can control him while at the same time being appalled by the images on screen. The fact that Anita is perfectly oblivious to these aspects of games makes her unqualified as a game critic and her analysis worthless.

I for one could use the body of an innocent person to distract guards while at the same time being appalled by the image of Agent 47 taking it and using it as a tool without the slightest sign of sympathy for the human being that woman was before she was murdered by a disgusting perverted monster. But that's of course not a possible scenario in Anita's world where I must have teabagged that dead body, fapped and laughed my ass off as I threw it off a ledge.

as we dutch say "wie een hond wil slaan vind licht een stok"

And if the roles were reversed, it would also be named sexism:
"when the man gets captured the woman is expected without any complaint or debate that she has to risk her health and life to save the lazy man who will certainly abuse her afterwards. this clearly teaches young boys women are slaves and expendable."

And i rest my case: would Mario risk getting gassed, eaten, crushed drowned and have his skin burned of his bones if he only saw peach as a mere object? Would he go through such intense agony unless he truly cared for her well being?

and about the hitman example i agree. you can shoot women and drag them around. Does this mean the developer wants you to abuse their bodies? NO! Can you also do it to the males? YES! So is it sexism? NO!


if so, go and arrest bungie because HALO OBVIOUSLY teaches boys to rape other males because it encourages "tea-bagging" dead corpses of players.

<span class="bold">Latest podcast from Honeybadger Radio is dedicated to gamergate</span> Some production problems at the beginning but worth it for the new info.
Good program and a lot to it!!! Enjoi! :-)

To me, it sounds more like creating sexism out of thin air, just for the sake of creating it.

I still fail to see the so called sexism with that strip-club hitman mission.
We've got here a mission with a fictional crime organisation exploiting women in a strip club. Everybody in that mission can be killed or dragged around by the player. Adopting that psycho-killer playstyle is not encouraged by the game, since killing innocent people result in a massive minus in the overall player score. The protagonist (agent 47) doesn't express any sort of pleasure or contentness while killing or dragging male or female corpses around. I didn't see the game developers/designers or the players glorifying the "female corpse dragging" anywhere...

So... where is that revolting "extra sexual jolt" specifically crafted for "male target groups" ? Where is the "misogyny" ?

Even for those I would have been inclined to agree with you, you manage to make it so over the top ridiculous that I couldn't help to chuckle a couple of times, now I understand why you see "hate mongers" everywhere...

But the strangest in the list still remain Bain, I am no fanboy of him, I just watched a bunch of his videos and read some of his tweets (i.e. the ones that were supposed to be the most "controversial") and I never saw anything resembling what you mention, he usually is more calm and level headed than most on either side and tend to apologize when he say something stupid (or something that got misinterpret or taken out of context), which again is more that can be said of most.

By curiosity is it because someday he committed the "unfathomable crime" of asking if the overused "white men privilege" argument was mostly an American invention that you consider him a "racist apologist" ? or is it because he said that he prefer dogs to cats ?

BTW - I am so glad GG is not about sexism in gaming, but ethics in game journalism. Phew

And this is helpful to the discussion how? Trolling much? But hey, support your sexist friends...one who lives in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...

Ah, you forget it's not sexist if a guy isn't saying it (by their "logic")

I am not sure what I said which makes economical, I feel it is very much a cultural problem.

It's both. Does you no good to wear blinders... it's ethics in game journalism mainly about sexism in gaming.

Note the context of the recent pages, where Jan 1st there was a long post about academic methodologies, where to me the ethical / objectivity critique of methodology is apparent. That discussion didn't really happen (we've had very similar ones more focused on journalism methodology itself - but either from personal influence or commonality of academic deformation the commonalities are there) and then that huge Gamergate troglodyte Vainamonen was the one (re)starting the AS back n forth while (obviously) wearing his blinders that there's nothing about ethics or methodology to discuss, move along, everyone does it in lit. academia... GG, always going back to attacking women huh? /sarc

So just in case, let me again be blunt, to have this passive aggressive comment, you basically needed to ignore each instance where folks are pointing to Vaina how Anita's methods of 'analysis' are 'problematic'. And you agreed with him that whats worth discussing (and even being discussed... none so blind, etc...) is only her 'obvious' conclusions, rather than how they were reached.