Thanks mate,

Fever's shown at least some willingness to correct his points... hence why I'm giving it a shot. I can be too persistent for my own good...

Regardless of which, I think my analysis of the SUSD "review" might have been useful.

I don't equate boycott and censorship, but they are pretty similar Fever, they can even overlap somewhat :)

Why do you think it matters how effective the review is or isn't at changing minds? Ethically it's their intent that matters... and their abandonment of journalistic objectivity for mission journalism :)

You also make a point about reviews being inherently subjective. Well duh... but should reviewers try for objectivity or not? I say yes. What say you? Are you another of the postmodernist crowd that think the most important truth is what you believe, because it's impossible to determine objective truth anyway? :)

What we're talking about is the paternalistic trend in social justice activism Fever. Or rather trying to, while being heckled about being misogynists. Here's a couple of quotes I like:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. ... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

What do you think? You folks on the left used to understand these things... anti religious secularism and democratic individual agency used to be liberal values... now you're setting up secular "theocracies" in all but name, calling out deviation from your moral norms. :)

what i feel is the difference is

boycott: Hey everyone, do not buy this shite. Just don't.

Censor: This product is for women beaters and rapists. Supporting it = being an abuser.
Censor: CHANGE THIS THING IN YOUR CHARACTER/STORY!!!!!!!!! OR ELSE!!!!!!!

I agree that Anita's criticism is often flawed, and that this is a problem.
Largely because when she does have a valid point.. her fuckups ruin it, since people just go "Oh, but look! She was WRONG here..." with the implication that obviously her overarching argument is just as wrong.
Now, granted, I don't believe a 'flawless victory' on her part would have prevented backlash either. The sorts of people that reacted particularly viciously are displaying a knee-jerk response to something they value & consider themselves entitled to: 'uncensored' (that is: static, unchanging, stagnant) videogames that display values they personally agree with, and none that they disagree with.
If she had fewer mistakes, the response likely would not have been that different; it's still the same perceived 'threat', and thus liable to provoke the same predictable response from the affected parties.


As for Cards Against Humanity, the general reasoning behind various cards (not just the one singled out) being removed is that they're not as funny as originally thought.
Is the 'passable transvestites' card really a hill people are choosing to die on?
Do they treasure the comic value of transphobic implications so much that it's something they're willing to condemn both the people hurt by it (& the attitudes it represents) and the game developers that agreed it was a shitty card?
I mean, CAH is a game that can be very different amongst different groups of people.
There are some selections people will find hilarious, some to which they will response with horror-tinged respect, & some that will be considered 'too far'.
(& of course those picks that are just not funny, usually because someone had a crap hand for whatever was played or was dumping unfunny/awkward cards.)

There's this weird conflict where Gamergaters are insisting that developers not allow external forces to influence their games, and yet there's a backlash when developers choose to (of their own volition, since CAH could easily have said "look, the game has the potential to offend a lot of different groups of people; just remove the card from your own games" ) alter their own product.
You can't have that both ways. You can't say "Don't allow people to influence what you decide to do with YOUR art" and then turn around and go "Don't do THAT with it! Fuck you! Fucking SJWs ruin everything!".
Like, really?
I mean, there was that furore from the same elements regarding a male NPC in a certain popular RPG that MIGHT maybe hit on a male PC, and/or that heterosexual male gamers were being left out or bullied or oppressed or someshit because of choices those developers had made.

The Witcher is a good example really. The world is pretty much an awful hellhole full of awful (human) things.
The first game kind of displayed shitty things on the parts of the devs/players, and this has been addressed moving forward and noted as being an immature thing to do.
The world itself is still the same. Same ol' hellhole (as far as I know; presumably Witcher III retained that atmosphere).
I've not really heard much (if any) feminist/SJW criticism about a 'realistic' portrayal of a sexist racist whatever-else-is-in-there-that-I've-forgotten setting.
So really it's more to do with how that is handled.
ie: You can portray a shitty setting or a shitty behaviour... and if you do so well then nobody's going to raise issue.
(Usually that means portraying it as a Bad Thing. Either explicitly through in-universe criticism or the 'heroes' condemning it, or implicitly through it just resulting in shitty things and a crapsack world.
Alternatively, it can be done externally via the creator/s saying it's a shitty thing to do and that whatever characters or groups espousing such beliefs are not nice/good people.)

I'm pretty sure white dudes can take some crit' anyway. They're confident self-assured modern men, right?
If someone is ignorant, they can address they by informing themselves.
If someone is doing a shitty thing, they should experience shame (being as it is one of the primary social modifiers).
If someone is neither of those things, they can shrug and move on with their lives.
Simples.


(Short version:
It's not about 'laughing at an inappropriate joke' so much as 'are you laughing because it's awful or are you laughing because you agree with the shitty thing?'.)

Which viciousness? If you mean the fringe trolls, then yeah, it's frightening that there are actually some people like that out there. That said, I've certainly never seen anyone in GG claim that games like Gone Home shouldn't be allowed to exist. Just that games that aren't like that shouldn't be criticized on the basis of not being Gone Home, and you can see the contempt for such games and those who play them in the Gamers Are Dead articles.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Well yes, now a technical question : How are critical tools built to analyzes literature and movies relevant to video games and what they offer ? That's where Sakressian get it all wrong, she uses a lot of theoretical tools that aren't adapted and basically analyze games like movies. There's just an evidence of it on her channel, check her videos that actually talk about movies, she just copy paste the same methods in games and hope it works, and I'm not even bringing up how so many times she does bring are irrelevant out of context examples to prove her "point", in a quite intellectually dishonest fashion.

Lol SusurrusParadox said Anita raises good points XD OMG someone apologise for that pwease. She raises NOTHING that is significant to videogames as a medium that is different from film and others. As Narakir said; the application of critique methods which place emphasis on characters and other movie tropes has little bearing on games where entire cities may have single character models and criticism of being able to handle bodies in a stealth game.

If anyone thinks Anita raises good points, they need to give up on understanding that there are differences between movies and games and accept that without being offended. And Witcher 1 and 2 being condemned reflects that that bigot doesn't even know what misogyny is. Collecting cards is misogyny? You know what; hows about someone mention ONE famous misogynist from before the 21st century and lets compare him to depiction of women in TW games. Lets see if Anita's bread teacup holds tea.

An intro to SJgroupthink lingo : http://www.reaxxion.com/8532/20-buzzwords-that-the-left-uses-to-attack-gamers

And lets not forget the illustrious career of one master Kuchera of course! I'd really like to see what SJWs see in him.http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=Ben_Kuchera

EDIT: Masterlist-http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php

ONE MORE: https://archive.is/1M0UA , reference to pimping; misogynist patriarchy mansplaining manspreading rape culture incoming............

i am really looking forwward to the SPJ airplay

What the heck is that? SJWs can't handle debating with books and TVs so they debate with air?

Ok, society of professional journos OK......seems good! Lets hope GG blows senpai's mind!

I fully admit that Anita's videos are a bit sophomoric, borrow too heavily from TV Tropes and somehow, despite the fact that she is a perfectly attractive woman, her strangely flirtatious style manages to be a bit creepy and inappropriate at times but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it isn't legitimate feminist critique albeit of slightly questionable quality...

The argument that she might be saying some of the right things in the wrong way, an overly antagonistic and divisive way that's not the best for gaming, gamers and their communities is potentially more legitimate though.

I was thinking, even as I linked to those wikipedia articles that explained what feminist critique of literature and cinema is, that I'm sure that the people who have misunderstood what Anita is trying to achieve with her videos read books and watch films but appear to have, thus far, gone though life blissfully unaware that feminist critique is even a thing - I think so far it's mainly been something for the realm of lofty intellectual and academic debate, maybe Anita has tried to introduce it to the mainstream badly and in the wrong way

Not that strata of intellectual thought really exist for computer games, with too many high-brow pundits thinking along the lines of Mr Ebert so I guess it is a little chicken and egg, to be fair...

Games and movies are not identical but I disagree that the differences make the tools and techniques for analyzing cinema and television completely invalid for application to video games.

For example, there are many games, off the top of my head lets give the examples of Enter The Matrix and Max Payne that are basically just sequences of exposition in cut scenes with extended interactive action sequences in between

If you took a full 'lets play' of Enter The Matrix and removed all of the interactive parts and just stitched the cut-scenes together I see no reason that you could not analyse that AS a film, a short companion piece to the Martix trilogy itself

If you then put the interactive action sequences back in, it's not like the story told by the cut scenes somehow disappears or ceases to matter - you are still being told that story

I don't, by any means, believe that cinematic cut scenes are the only example of a story telling device in games that can legitimately be analysed using the same techniques as those used in cinema but I think it's maybe be the most obvious and hard to refute example

Plus Anita should maybe get something of a 'pioneer pass' I mean I'm imaging now a future documentary saying
"The first wave of feminist critics to analyse games, such names as Anita Sarkessian, simply, crudely applied the same tools and techniques to games as their forebears had applied to film but it wasn't long before others such as..."

I can't believe that I live in a world where you say these things and *I* get called the troll sometimes!
I think what you're saying does a gross dis-service to the story-telling power of computer games, for example, Broken Sword was released before the film OR the book version of The Da Vinci Code but, in my opinion tells a similar but superior story with greater characterisation, humor, pace and viewer involvement than either

I've only played the first chapter of the TellTale Back To the Future game but so far I genuinely believe it to be simply THE best Back to the Future IV we could ever hope for at this point in history, as a visual story

And the first couple of Monkey Island games are simply some of THE best stories for narrative and humor I've experience in ANY medium

And that's just the point-and-click adventures, before we even think about stuff like The Last of Us, the wonderfully nihilistic academia of the Half-Life and Portal games or the much copied 'fragmented narrator' story telling device of System Shock 2 where the crew's experience of the last days of a zombie infestation far from home, in deep space is told via found journal entries.

Oh and Planescape: Torment, of course, because mentioning it is pretty much a contractual obligation at this point!