Once again you've managed to twist words around. I never once said a female soldier should sit as though she were at a picnic. It was merely an easy example to Google that showed women sitting naturally in an outdoor environment. Never once did I say they should sit in such a manner or that they always do, just that it is not uncommon.

Also, I am not sure how my criticism of Sarkeesian leaving out information and misrepresenting video games is "reverse sexism." I didn't say it was men being discriminated against or anything similar to that. The fact of the matter is, both sexes are equal in this regard. They both disappear because the game cannot maintain the bodies being in view for very long. There is nothing sinister at play here, and there are certainly no assumptions being made other than those by Anita.

You suggest I see her as dishonest because I see her videos as an attack on the industry. I feel a very clear distinction needs to be made here. It is because she is dishonest that I see her videos as an attack on the industry. It is her dishonesty that came through loud and clear that made me later judge the videos as such, not the other way around. She doesn't take the time to understand the games she critiques or even familiarize herself with the content. Maybe I'll change my mind though if she can explain to me how she ever came to the conclusion that Bayonetta was a single mother, another game she has consistently misrepresented.

As for the rest, I feel Shadowstalker and Rusty have covered the response to your post well enough.

An absolutely fair point and something I will certainly try to be more mindful of here. It is easy to get caught up in nitpicking things and lose sight of the larger picture. Oops.

Welcome.

Easy to answer... because geeks geek, by which I mean they / we tend to obsess about the details and lose sight of the big picture. Such effective political rhetorics as you suggest are not very natural to the GG group.

But really, although I generalized to give you a quick answer, in truth, not all of us get so distracted. And the same tendency to lose the forest for the trees is also found on the anti GG side.

lmao

Thanks for that. I needed someone to laugh at, and you seemed happy to oblige.

That silliness reminds me of being scolded by an intellectual version of my 9th grade gym teacher.

'Your linear thinking prohibits proper understanding of 20th century socialist labor movements and you have no concept of post-modern views of top-down technology demands on an increasingly stratified and divided working class. Now give me 3 more laps on the track, you skinny neck geek.'

Well, are you going more into a "there are no sexist stereotypes in games" argumentative direction here, or more into a "there are evidently stereotypes that could be called sexist, but can those really have any effect on us?" direction?

These final lines in my last post (which I haven't written for the first time in some form) can, if you wish, ultimately serve as your personal way to dismiss the tropes Sarkeesian suggests. The credibility of those categories hinge on the viewer's recognition of the tropes. Crucially. I've played hundreds of games in more than a quarter century, and I recognize a whole lot as actually systemic (though definitely not all). So undoubtedly a lot of these tropes contitute truth to me.

I guess that's the hump you really have to get over first. If none of these tropes exist, what sense does it even make to discuss possible effects? There are more humps before that question is even asked, and in these kinds of discussions, people usually entrench themselves behind the very first with weapons drawn: Are there sexist stereotypes in games?

When someone dismisses those tropes because he or she doesn't recognize them, that's fair! When someone criticises factual inaccuracies that actually ARE factual inaccuracies, even those completely irrelevant to the line of argument ("single mother"), well, fair enough!

When someone dismisses the series and the presenter as "dishonest", the discussion is evidently over. The fruitful earth of debate is scorched.


In this whole crappy shit flinging contest that once was gamergate, but now has dissolved and merged into a myriad of same but different witch hunts for the SJW, and that has outrage culture at its center regardless of ideology, Anita Sarkeesian has stayed immensely classy, especially considering what she had to endure making a simple video series. She has not replied to the clear cut abuse personally hurled at her by the likes of Adrian Chmielarz and John Bain (and a whole lot of others). She hasn't engaged in anything that could be called doxing, like Randi Harper. She hasn't compiled any kind of hitlist of her enemies, like the abominable sjwlist.com and deepfreeze.it websites do. She explicitly doesn't name and shame developers, journalists or critics, like a whole lot of social outrage activists from Vox Day to Brianna Wu. She is explicitly not part of game culture's universal actual problem.

Are you talking about Anita "everything is sexist" Sarkeesian, Classy?! she throws shit every chance she can it seems
masculinity is toxic, women choosing for themselves is bad

what I don't like about her
1) she became part of gaming culture by basically saying everything good in mature games is horrible & wrong. I would Not have an issue if she framed that as her opinion but what she does is to try to pass that off as a fact.
2) she is against criticism labeling it as harassment (just reference her UN speech if you don't understand).

lol calling everything sexist and racist is classy? Just like calling anyone who disagrees with you a Nazi? Might classy of her.

Keep in mind the validity of a trope is subjective, and its existence alone has never been proven to cause any harm. And what is and is not a trope can vary depending on how you look at it. A character may conform to many tropes when looked at from a wide perspective and may may conform with none if looked at in detail.

Also not that tropes aren't necessarily a negative connotation and can represent trends in the market. People can say the stoic male trope is a trope but it can still immerse players, same with the voiceless hero, the random prisoner etc. Anything can be called a ''trope'' after some similar stuff is released.

So Vain recognizing / not enjoying tropes he deems to be ''systemic'' doesn't mean everyone does or that no one will enjoy games with them. And going along the lines of tropes, Vain himself said art critique has never been objective, which is true. So pushing this as anything more than a simple critique from any other critic is retarded.

If her alleged dishonesty is such a conversation breaker from her eager altruistic goal of ending all sexism in games, why can't she address it even once and then claim harassment if people don't believe her? Could it be because there isn't an argument that she isn't dishonest?

(also for Shadowstalker16, Kurina and Vainamoinen - i got troubles to link several posts at once, sorry)

Whoa, so many reactions! :)
I took Anita S. really just as an example, because it was the last topic in the thread; I wasn't suggesting anything in regard of discussions here. Arguing about the works of fiction is yet another way to enjoy them and I would be the last to dismiss it (if for no other reason, because I love to do it too). By "we" I meant people engaging in public debates in general.

I do not demand "effective political rhetorics" in geeky discussion thread, but I would except more of it on the "higher" levels. Also, I don't see it just as rhetoric: if there are some strong arguments that sexism in fiction affect significantly gamers' behavior in the "real world", then it IS serious issue. But those arguments should be really convincing, because USA is already full of groups with similar claims ("heavy metal is satanic" is one quite obvious variant).
(speaking about forest and trees, I see it more like "barking on the right tree - in the wrong forest")
I was just curious why this pragmatic approach seems to be so rare today, I would like to comapare your opinions with mine.
-

Speaking about tropes, let me mention this site
http://tvtropes.org/
<<WARNING x POSSIBLY HIGHLY ADDICTIVE>>

The creators have no higher ambitions than identifying and cataloguing as many storytelling devices ("tropes" in their rather loose definition) as possible and keep them mostly in pop-cultural context. Perhaps because of it, it is pretty close to what I call research work.
Relevant to the discussion:
TropesAreTools

SJW started the witch hunting, not cry now for what you guys produced in the other side. It is mostly your fault.

Anita Sarkeesian has stayed immensely hypocritical, and she is mostly a BIG LIE from the feet of alleged feminism to the top of her also alleged "love for gaming", so here is the reason why she didnt engaged in anything, because she just blocked comments to continue outraging easy targets and grossing money without entering in polemics beyond ignite them to get buzz.

She is far more smart that Randi Harper or Brianna Wu, she is far more cold and is easy to notice her zero empathy something that is pretty good for make money. And from the whole troop I can only defend Zoe Quinn she is the classy one, she is the one that never been in fights, beyond needed to cope with the most stupid part of GG doxing her, the only crime she did was doing a shitty game, something that actually has far more merit than any of the Sarkesian, stolen material videos, that takes eons to be produced, not also considering that Quinn probably also REALLY likes gaming.

Have you seen the Ralph interview with Candace Owens (of Social Autopsy)?

Note: I'm not a fan of either but IMHO it's still interesting.

Yeah that retard seemed to be leading her on as if he knew what she was talking about. But the most important thing to note is what Owens said :

-Gets call from Zoe Quinn saying she was contacted by anti-bullying groups to talk to Owens about her ''product''
-She says it will dox people
-Owens is suspicious since she also met up with anti-bullying organizations to discuss this, also suspicious as to why Zoe isn't saying who contacted her to speak to her as a third party instead of talking to her directly
-Owens says it won't be searchable, that people who don't know the person irl can't find people, etc She obviously has something in mind but doesn't explain how these features will work and Ralph doesn't ask her either
-Zoe tells her some harassers are good people
-Owens says she's open to discussion
-Zoe says she will be targeted by gamergate
-Owens says she knew this would be risky
-Zoe tells her ''it will ruin everything'', breaks down crying and hangs up
-45mins later she gets emails that harassing her with their titles saying ''don't mess with gamers''

EDIT: in the last point, its not ''don't mess with gamers'' but that she received harassment from accounts which had ''gamer'' in the username.

VERY interesting.
I will check it during my evening, thanks!

If we leave the giant steaming crap heap of "Ralph" conspiracy theory out of it, things are looking a whole lot more sensible.

Candace Owens is in all probability a really nice girl. But she's also a deeply traumatized person. What she suggests as the 'solution' to the problem of harassment is essentially a tool for harassment. For exacting revenge. Not an inch better than the sjwlist.com or deepfreeze.it. It's a fucking hitlist, but made by even less tech savvy persons and will consequently be abused the shit out of.

Can we agree on that, first thing in the morning?

Now if you had followed what Zoe Quinn has been doing this past year, you'd see that revenge is simply not part of it, and you'd see that Quinn has turned out to be the greatest defender of online anonymity you could ever think of, in order to protect the victims.

Quinn decidedly tries to see the human being behind the harasser. She's speaking of experiences in which she'd been called up by people with clear cut intent to harass, but in the second they hear a real human voice, found themselves unable to execute that intent.

That's where Ralph's "some harassers are good people" bullshit comes from.

Owens herself has described Quinn's call as "begging her" to stop the Kickstarter. That I can understand, absolutely. Candace has suffered plenty harassment, but has no idea whatsoever how to stop it, and what gruesome forms it may take. She doesn't seem to understand that nothing is won when she turns into a harasser herself. It's damaging naivity.

It's strange how people seem to think that Quinn shouldn't have warned Candace of gamergate. At its founding event, gamergate carried Eron Gjoni's torch to light the stake under Zoe Quinn. For her perceived personal faults more than the eight and a half words of positive coverage she may have received. In what world, in what world wouldn't she warn a potential victim of gamergate?

Now that the Kickstarter's been stopped, Candace is going completely nuts on twitter. If she can't exact her revenge on her harassers, she must exact revenge on anyone who stopped her, even if it had been for her own good.

This is a sad story for either party involved. Miserable days all around (I guess Milo Yiannopoulos has a lot of fun, but that's about it). It would be nice not to delve into even more harassment inducing conspiracy theories. Extremely stupid ones at that.

Thank you.

Deepfreeze.it is a good site. What are your problems with it? It lists ethical violations of journalists and isn't even a SJW callout site / list either. Its good to have and its useful to see a journo's past work before deciding to support them. More info for the consumer, and something that helps make decisions on who to disable adblock on.

SJWlist is mostly empty, but its just a list of people who disagree. Little more than the GG autoblocker endorsed by all antiGG figureheads like Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and Randi Harper. If you have problem with it, what about them using a bigger list?

I don't know what Candace Owens wants. She seems to be alluding to a non searchable, non abusable list that is based on anonomous content addition and editing.

Quinn said in her phonecall with Owens that she was a part of anonymous and shortly after her call, threads about the KS came up on 4chan. I don't trust her, and find it good I don't need to. You say GG was about harassing her more than ethics, I couldn't care less about fanciful fact exclusion. Either way, I doubt she had good intentions with this and I don't understand how some stuck up indie dev can be seen as some champion of anonymity either, if for nothing more than to cover up her own harassment of others.

I wouldn't say theories are out of the question. Owens started receiving harassment only after Quinn called her and said ''She would ruin everything''. Threads appeared on 4chan where Quinn has friends she used to silence Quinnspiracy discussion and force the exodus to 8chan.

From what I can tell,it seems that Candace may hold off on the original project to cast a much needed light on the whole GG situation. and I for one welcome that. the apparent harassment meant to scare her off seemed to have emboldened her