Well, I often hear people talk about liberalism as if it is the worst of these things. Some might even say it is one of the reasons people are able to complain about sexism and racism, which of course many people hate.

If he is anything like me (he seems to be...) then he probably thinks circularly/iteratively rather than linearly.
It took me years of exposure to corporate executive summaries to learn succinct, direct communication skills.

Anyhow, please both of you, keep it impersonal so we can all enjoy well argued points. K?

I played the game years ago, and I have bad memory for games plots, but I readed Rands just after finished the first Bioshock, I never heard about her before.

Not going into too much detail, the name of Atlas was taken from her work, but they made him represent something completly different and actually oppose Rand's philosophy.
Anyway, great game and great read.

Hey again Brasas.

A less formal differentiation (at least to me) is the difference between "debate" and "Haha! I win, I say 'X' and thus you are proven wrong, I win, my ego is satisfied and your honour is forfeit!" etc. I don't care about raking up imaginary internet points in "winning" arguments against someone. I'm not on a crusade to prove everyone who holds some other point of view as wrong. I simply don't care about that, but that seems to be most of what is going on here.

Now I really hate to do this, it is the most cliched and tiresome thing, but considering how many times I've been accused of not knowing what "perpetuate" means, let me quote a definition:

The act of prolonging existence, of keeping something alive or active.
Synonyms
continuance, preservation

Nothing about "causing to increase" or "having no effect". I don't know what everyone thinks "perpetuate" implies, but I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. In this case, I'm not "implying" anything except what is written.
This is where my bread example came in. Technically, bread satiates hunger. But a person only being able to eat 1 slice of bread a day and nothing else is a system that PERPETUATES hunger. Bread isn't the cause of the person's hunger. Eating bread doesn't increase hunger. Not eating bread won't make the hunger less. Bread in this scenario isn't bad in and of itself. But providing the person with a more balanced diet with more food will stop the perpetuation of hunger- hunger that was caused because the person's daily meal had been normalised to 1 slice of bread a day.

What I'm saying is that better thought-out games would stop PERPETUATING sexism in games. Depending on the subject matter, some games might even combat it by challenging people's viewpoints, but that is a specific case of a specific kind of game, and I wasn't talking about that.

He started it!! :p

I'm just giving him some tips. Amateur philosophy is all well and good but its pointless if you can't make a proper argument.

I'm saying it's an implication, precisely because it is not explicit in what you have been saying. You can't imply what is written, as that's by definition explicit. If there is an implication, it must be hidden, or it's not an implication...

If games might reduce sexism, logically they may also increase it, yes? If not please help me understand why the effect goes only one way.

Aaaand just like that you've ignored the entire thing. Congratulations.

I explicitly said that I DIDN'T want a definition of sexism. When I ask a question I want an answer. If people can't figure out WHY I'm asking a given question, that's perfectly fine.
With such brutal questions as "Why do you think sexism in games is bad?" it can turn out one of two ways - the question can be dismissed, or the interlocutor can rethink the fundamental assumption he is making. I took my chances. Here's the result in hyperbolic paraphrase:
"- THIS IS SEXIST! THIS IS SEXIST!
- Alright, alright... Fine. This IS sexist. Now - why is that bad?
- I'M NOT TELLING YOU!"

I don't need to put forward jack shit. The onus is not on me. If people claim there is something wrong, it is they who need to show that it is. I didn't want it to degrade into "Yes, they are sexist! / No, they're not sexist! / What is sexism anyway?", so I've instead took it a step further.
Not that it should matter to you, considering that you've disregarded everything I've said and instead focused on me saying things as a fact of its own. This is now a meta-discussion.

Your concern and helpful tip has been noted.

See - you don't quite get it. I'm not a lawyer nor a politician. It is not my goal to "convince" people. I want the Truth. I also want people to understand issues better. That's why I write a lot and ask surprising questions.
Also - it's not "writing what I don't mean". There's this thing called (in rough translation) "courtesy". It's when you make an effort to figure out what a person has in mind. This is a convention, not an unavoidable state. You're probably the third person I've met that has shown a propensity to willfully break it, in order to be "technically right", but fail to address the point. I wouldn't consider this my suggestion to you, since when you wish, you seem to remain obtuse quite willfully.

That's the thing you cannot "demand" creators not to do something and at the same time pretend it will give them "more freedom". You are not asking for more freedom all you are just asking is for game to be changes/altered/censored to remove what you find "objectionable", that's not asking for more diversity that's actually exactly the opposite.

Yes there are a lot of games that abuse of over used tropes and all genre of stereotypes, but guess what not only it's not limited to games but it doesn't make necessarily makes it a bad game (or a sexist one) either.

Witcher had the "amnesiac hero" trope which is probably one of the most abused and most overused trope in the history of story telling and yet it doesn't prevent it from being a good game; I am not going to "demand" CDP to stop using such an overused trope and I am not going to pretend if would have improved or "grown up" the game if they hadn't used it.

Deus Ex, another very popular games, is also overloaded with all sort of tropes, conspiracy theories, stereotypes, cliché you can ever imagine and yet it didn't prevent it from being a good game.

I am sure that the next Rainbow Six won't become a bad games just because it committed the hate crime of using the evil "damsel in distress" trope (Knowing Ubi it will probably sucks for a tons of other reasons but that's another story...)

Well you don't really hear the whole "games are sexists" a lot outside of the US and UK; I read French gaming press and 99% of the time when a Kotaku or RPS article on the subject is mentioned it's either to make fun of it or to point at it's contradictions.

And concerning "violence and strong language" that's because violence is usually tolerated in US culture, a lot more that sex, so they are not really any US pressure group that would call you "whatever'ist" if you have violence a in video games. While there are a lot that will call you sexist if you start hitting or killing women in a game or racist if you dare to pretend that it's normal that a zombie game taking place in Africa feature black zombies.

I haven't really see anything more with this backlash than what you wouldn't by reading basic Yahoo news or MSNBC news comments. When it comes to death threats, insults and general douche-baggery it's hard to do worse than those two...

The key word here is "evident", most of the time it's not "evident" at all as most of the time it's a question of point of view and/or bias, often it's just a basic trope, sometime overused I give you that, that can be made into a "misogynist" one if you try hard enough, and of course not helped by the fact that a lot of peoples don't have a single clue what misogynist actually mean.

Basically anything can be made into a "sexist" or "misogynist" trope/stereotype, there are lot of feminists who find Josh Whedon work to be pro-feminist and at the same time a lot of others who find it, often the same series or even the same scenes, to be hateful against woman and extremely sexists.

Before I proceed with this post let me go over some definitions of terms which I think most of us can agree on;

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sexist

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sexism

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Misogeny

So the US has recognized video games are an art form and are given protection under the 1st amendment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchants_Association#Opinion

The reasoning behind the decision is very key, you see in the last sentence of that section in the article the justices found no compelling link between violent video games and behavior (particularly in children). Looking into the matter one would find a slew of studies that seem to contradict each other about whether this is true or not. We can look to facts a bit though to see if maybe there is an over all problem. For the sake of argument, we will say video games became part of main US culture when Pong came about in 1972. Let's check out the crime rate between then and 2012 in the US;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time

Well interestingly enough violent crime is down to a level lower than when Pong was released, murder is down to levels yet again before Pong existed, even more interesting is rape is down to levels near 1976 (several years after Pong), robbery is down to a levels comparable to 1967 and 1968, and finally aggravated assault is down to levels we had back in 1978. You would think with how many children played video games in each of those passing years (the ESA has claimed over 51% of US households have at least one console and 59% of US citizens play video games.) , we would see a steady increase of crime per so many people (Particularly the 90's and 2000's)

http://www.theesa.com/facts/

I would think if video games increased or perpetuated sexism and misogyny, we would be seeing higher rape ratings or at least a rating that hangs steady that ever increases as well as less women gamers (who would play a game that offends ones sensibilities strongly?) Currently 48% of "gamers" are in fact women. Also incidents of sexual assault overall in the US have gone down considerably since 1993. Link as follows

https://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency-of-sexual-assault

In closing I would like to state that there may be a capacity for video games or any art to influence people. I don't know enough about psychology to make a determination. However before we start acting on accusations and belief, and before we start legislating the problem away, we must first make absolutely sure that what we are calling the problem is truly the issue. Otherwise we run dangerously close to destroying art and freedoms to reign in a small segment of people who have serious mental issues. Consider the stark warning from one of our founding fathers;

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Benjamin Franklin

This is a genuine question, but when does Sarkesian say its sexist? Its not something I recall in her videos, though I may have missed that. What I understood her to be saying is that its part of a trope, which to me does not equate to it being sexist per-say.

I thought one of her many short-circuit brain fails is trope=sexist.

He has a point. Feminists don't sing the same tune when it's men being subjected to sexism and sexual objectification. If it's really so bad, then why isn't there more of a feminist response when it's men that are being treated like that?

If feminists are really about equality, then there should be an equal response to cases where men are being treated like that.
A physicist? How can you live with yourself. You've clearly oppressed so many women.

Unless you're a woman in which case, thank you for sticking it to those evil men and take a spot that they could have had.
That's an underlying assumption. Her series would have no point if it weren't sexist. She's a feminist and if the concern wasn't sexism, then she wouldn't have called the entire series "tropes vs., women."

It's a contextual clue that she's decided that there's something sexist or misogynistic about games in general, otherwise there'd be no need for the dynamic.

That's probably why I didn't 'demand' anything in the first place.

What I'm saying is that we had a bottleneck in place for many decades, and I wonder where we would be if that bottleneck didn't exist.

Sexist scenes don't make a game bad on the spot, correct. Wasn't that what I have been arguing for a few dozen pages? Isn't that what Sarkeesian says in every first minute of any one of her videos?


You've lost me concerning the thematic progression here. The first Witcher game used amnesia because it didn't want to deal with the ending of Geralt in the books too quickly, which would have overwhelmed players new to the saga immediately. It is still a cheap device that doesn't make good stories. But story and game are largely separate; good game mechanics can save even the most abysmal storyline.


I can confirm that the topic has relevance in Germany and Norway. Apart from that, no idea.


...and it's probably rather futile to start a discussion trying to find the worst community in existance, so let's not do that. I saw comments accumulating under the first Sarkeesian video before they were turned off, I've never seen this level of aggression, it was clear that among that community it had become a contest as to who could pull off the most gross thing and there were hundreds of extremely promising contestants in that respect.


There's that one article in one of the Firefly secondary lit books ("Finding Serenity"). It attempts a feminist critique of Firefly, but fails, unfortunately hilariously so. If I remember correctly, the author even went so far as to suggest that her daughter would simply not understand movies which displayed the elementary historic problem of women's powerlessness. But of course, sexism doesn't just vanish because we are less shown that it existed and continues to. And usually, Whedon is perceived as a very strong feminist voice - rightly so.