Yep, I'm makin' it a roundtable.

Not to get too "political" on you, but I watched this six-part video series recently, and I thought it was really well-done. It may seem like a typical anti-GamerGate video at the start, but it isn't. It isn't even truly about Anita Sarkeesian. The analysis is very logical and even-handed, and I appreciated the way that it recast the whole feminism issue (or any social progress issue, really) by framing it from the perspective of the people whom it irritates. Honestly, it almost single-handedly repaired the damage done to my judgement by thousands upon thousands of strident internet-liberals.

Try to go in without any pre-conceived expectations and watch it with an open mind.








I'll give you the Cliffs Notes, in case you don't want to watch right now. Essentially, the video series analyzes WHY people like Anita Sarkeesian produce such a strong negative reaction, and it goes beyond the usual simplistic "They're taking our games!!" rhetoric. This guy posits that the REAL, underlying reason why Anita makes many gamers uncomfortable is that she causes them to question their way they've lived their life to this point. Ignorance is bliss, and the aim of people like Anita is to remove that ignorance. Like the term "privilege". A lot of people hate that term, and it's always rubbed me the wrong way, as well. But it doesn't mean that your life is peaches and cream or that every person from a minority has it tough. It just means that a minority person in the same position as you would have it harder, solely due to the way they were born.

That's an uncomfortable thought, as most people think of themselves as fundamentally good people, and acknowledging that you've never questioned your advantages or thought to help the less fortunate would call your own morality into question. And we're ALL guilty of that, to be honest. It's almost unnatural behavior to revolt against a system that personally benefits you. I mean, I don't like the thought of killing living creatures. I find the thought of hunting utterly revolting. I don't even swat mosquitoes or gnats. If I really considered the fact that animals had to die just so I could enjoy a hamburger, I'd probably be a vegetarian. So I don't WANT to consider it. Because meat is delicious!

Similarly, look at freaking FoxConn. All of our consumer electronics products are basically made of Chinese children. Who the fuck wants to think about that?! What's the alternative?

I'm not saying that I'm necessarily going to change my behavior based on this video series. I still believe that ignorance is bliss, and if you spend all of your time thinking about the evils of the world, your life's probably not going to be very enjoyable. But I still think it was worth watching. It kind of brought stuff that has always been floating at the back of my consciousness to the forefront. And what I most appreciate is that it did so in a non-judgmental way. It might make you a bit uncomfortable, but it definitely won't single you out.

URL to share (right click and copy)

@r_hjort

Yeah, I think that would be good. Whenever we talk of groups being held down, its usually the same groups of people. It would ASTONISH me if the next time "racism" was brought up, we started with and went right to the Romani/Gypsies and Native Americans at first blow. Just sweep 'em under the rug, right? Truly sad. (Food for thought: I'd never even heard the term "Romani" until this very page of this very thread. Hows that suit ya for coverage?)

EDIT-
Zero said:

A real life example would be if an Asian guy and a black guy are competing for a job and the black guy is the better candidate but the Asian guy is just assumed to be smarter / more competent / more reliable / etc. because he is Asian, so he gets the job.

What you're describing sounds like a perversion of "Affirmative Action." No, that isn't fair; best candidate should get the job, always.

@Stephen

And who do you trust most to provide an accurate representation of black people? Black people in a show that they made, or white-guy Zero (or anyone, really)? Do you understand what I'm saying yet? (Like...who do you think knows most about Indian culture here? Anyone betting on someone other than Anand needs their head examined.)

------------------


Video stuff:
I'd never seen Zoe Quinn or even heard of Brianna Wu before this (and judging by the "interest over time" line graph, I'm guessing a lot of other people haven't either). I've watched #3 and #4 up there, and I still don't know what GamerGate is. It sounds like "The Internet" to me. Why is ANYONE surprised? That crap has been going on forever with 4chan, etc. FOR-E-VER. In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw someone in this thread already say "4chan is a cesspool." Well, DUH.

And now I've watched #5 and #6, too. I dunno. I feel like Angry Jack, even though I don't / didn't do half the stuff. I don't think I've ever yelled at a stranger to eat a dick either. How rude! --Jar Jar Binks. I do, however, make women uncomfortable by simply existing. Gotta love those trips to the grocery store, and then happen to be walking behind them on the way to my car at night, minding my business! It's a "great" feeling. (Thats sarcasm there. Gotta play it safe in here.)

And I really don't like Stephen Colbert. Or Jon Stewart. I don't know how they could represent two different sides on Comedy Central, and I dislike both of them with the fury of Polaris. Its really confusing to me. (DAMN! I thought I just coined "Fury of Polaris," and I DIDN'T. CURSES!)


"One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they tell you about their experiences," unless of course that woman is your wife, and she tells you that she sees through Anita Sarkeesian's crap. In the event of that, a bunch of guys call it "anecdotal," as if to say that the experience of this one woman doesn't matter. If you're an internet sensation though.. (Again, nothing new; those with the loudest voice have always been heard the easiest. For a literal representation, come to the next WWE Live Event with me in September. Your ears may hurt before its over! And my voice will most assuredly be wrought to shreds. --According to Yahoo, this is only the 2nd time that "wrought to shreds" has been muttered on the internet. ..or maybe thats because I used it wrong. I don't care.)


--Look at this:


Somebody made a stink because you can be in a wheelchair and NOT be 65. Lets just forget for a moment that you're probably more likely to be in a wheelchair at 65 than someone who is far younger. I spent part of last week in the hospital being told "you're far too young to have this" and "this usually only occurs in pregnant women," yet it did in me, a "young," non-pregnant male. It's like...the thing that ailed me was most often slotted for older, more pregnant people. Is that sexist? Ageist? Or am I now "anecdotal evidence" to be forgotten, screwing over someone else my age who checks into emergency and has their visit prolonged (as I did) because they don't fit the profile?


..I have no idea where I'm going with this (like always). Going swimming now. I'm a fat pig-man and I need exercise.

@Mr_Mustache We're not going to agree on Affirmative Action, but really that is the goal of Affirmative Action, exactly what you said. It just doesn't assume that this happens naturally, because it doesn't happen naturally. All research we have proves there is a hiring bias AGAINST certain demographics and Affirmative Action tries to actively eliminate the effects of that bias.

Probably not the best way in the longterm. It's a stop gap until we can figure out how to eliminate racial bias in hiring.

@Stephen Not only can groups propagate stereotypes about themselves, it is often done to meet the needs of white-dominated Capitalism aka the status quo, not because that is their true artistic vision of themselves. One of Shirley's favorite graphic novelists is a woman who used to work as an artist in gaming and has said things about how working in that system affected the way she was able to create female characters. Only now as a (relative) complete independent can she create the characters that she wants to.

So like, when people point at Bayonetta and say "but a woman designed her!" I think yeah, but what does that mean exactly? We don't know what pressures were on that designer, how much she was forced to conform to the needs of a male-dominated industry. I'm not saying the reverse either mind you, that she was just pandering to men, maybe this is exactly what she wanted to make. I just don't see her being a woman as stone cold evidence that this is for sure what a woman not influenced by men wanted to create. Employees are always working under the pressures of the systems that dominate the fields they are employed in.

@Zero

I know you said "I'm not saying the reverse either," but it is almost as if you're saying "..no woman could create this without pressure from above" with all of your examples. Maybe Bayonetta is who she WISHES she was? Do you know why women wear high heels? Primarily to make their legs look longer in most girls, and if that isn't the desired goal (ie: "I wish I was taller!"), the elongating appearance is a nice fringe benefit of sorts.

Bayonetta has super spider legs.

@Mr_Mustache
I guess the fact that you hadn't heard the word 'Romani' before is in itself a sign of how little we discuss the issue in general. 'Gypsy' is perhaps the most common way of referring to the Romani people for many, but it's a name others have given them, and one that over time has become more and more derogatory and offensive to Romani since it's so closely connected to various prejudiced ideas about them as a people.

Mr_Mustache said:

@Stephen

And who do you trust most to provide an accurate representation of black people? Black people in a show that they made, or white-guy Zero (or anyone, really)? Do you understand what I'm saying yet? (Like...who do you think knows most about Indian culture here? Anyone betting on someone other than Anand needs their head examined.)

It's questions like this that are troublesome man. When you say 'accurate representation of black people' you are asking someone to accurately portray so many different people that it is impossible. There is no one size fits all black representation. What you can do though is have a well written character who happens to be black. Many people have done so and not all of them are black.

I have been very careful in this thread not to downplay or discredit Anand's experience. I'm sure he is far more in tune with India's culture than I am. That doesn't mean though that I accept the statement to be true.

Mr_Mustache said:

--Look at this:


Somebody made a stink because you can be in a wheelchair and NOT be 65. Lets just forget for a moment that you're probably more likely to be in a wheelchair at 65 than someone who is far younger. I spent part of last week in the hospital being told "you're far too young to have this" and "this usually only occurs in pregnant women," yet it did in me, a "young," non-pregnant male. It's like...the thing that ailed me was most often slotted for older, more pregnant people. Is that sexist? Ageist? Or am I now "anecdotal evidence" to be forgotten, screwing over someone else my age who checks into emergency and has their visit prolonged (as I did) because they don't fit the profile?

What's wrong with people asking Lego to consider disabled young people when making their toys?

Mr_Mustache said:

I do, however, make women uncomfortable by simply existing. Gotta love those trips to the grocery store, and then happen to be walking behind them on the way to my car at night, minding my business! It's a "great" feeling. (Thats sarcasm there. Gotta play it safe in here.)

It's almost as if those people shouldn't judge you based on your appearance... Nah, probably all the long haired, bearded guys they met before are sketchy guys so it's only right that they would act accordingly.

So... this thread has just turned into another "Everyone tries to budge Mr. Mustache, who simply won't budge" thread.

Maybe time to start the countdown clock.

I mean, I have a lot to say about a lot of the recent posts, but perhaps we should try to steer this back to the actual videos posted?

I posted these videos over at D1P as well.

There were some comments that went about as you would expect.

@Brick Was that the other site full of IGN exiles?

I feel like... we got the good ones. FOR THE MOST PART.

@Zero
HEY!

...or alternatively, thanks!

@Zero

That would be the one, starting off as Bad Cartridge before we had to change our name.

@Zero

Hmm.

IGN = England/(Europe?)
America= Bad Cartridge/D1P (All the puritan ridiculousness)
Australia= Negative World (Less people, more awesome)

Yup. Seems fair .

Nah if that were the case we'd see posts by spiders outnumbering posts by humans by like 1,000 to 1.

@Zero

Spiders don't post. Don't be silly.

Stephen said:

I think it has been said before but people can absolutely hold racist/sexist opinions about groups they themselves may be a part of.

Ok, but isn't it the DUTY of someone in said group to make sure that they are doing what they can to buck stereotypes if they are indeed false? (ie: female gamers are doing it every day.) I can tell you that if people thought that I (or my "group") was cheap, or a bad tipper, I'd be spending extra money everywhere. Seriously. (And like Jargon mentioned up there, I try to say "Hello!" to women in a voice a good octave higher than my normal voice. I DON'T want to be a scary long-haired, bearded guy..but I'm not going to shave because then I'll look HIDEOUS. And while I think Jargon was utilizing sarcasm, I actually agree with what he said up there. Hell, even I'm scared by guys with long hair and beards sometimes.) I should try to find a clip from that Maron show.. I wonder if they're easy to find. For the future...

--I was watching Dish Nation today (were you guys watching, too?), and one of the guys in there was talking about how he won't order chicken in the Atlanta airport because he doesn't want any white people to see him eating it..so what he does is goes and buys something else at this deli, gets a big bag, then he finds ANYONE, asks them to get him Popeye's, he gives them money for each of their meals, then he sticks his meal into his deli bag, goes and finds a seat that faces a wall, and covertly eats his food. No, it wasn't a joke.

@Zero

I posted thoughts about the last four videos, and "everyone" (not EVERYONE, but you know) just went back to jumping down my throat. (or as Kris super-kindly put it: "budging") Simply hit "reference;" it works wonders. I was Link to the Past, and I played catchup for 6 pages. Now we're talking about spiders using computers for some reason. And you no sold my stuff about "normal girl vs. internet darling." Why is one woman's observations more important than another's? If the answer involves "Twitter handle," I'm going to SCREAM.

@Mr_Mustache It's probably the duty of everyone to make sure groups are represented well. That's sort of my point of view anyway, but since video game development is dominated by white males (and to a lesser extent in America but still a real one, Japanese males) that is where change can most easily happen. Also there is a thing called "cultural appropriation" that sort of a big deal. But I mean I don't watch BET like apparently you do so I don't have the best sense of how blacks represent themselves in mainstream "black media". I do see them represent themselves pretty well in the "black media" that I do watch though, like Dear White People. I'm not sure why you are harping on minorities specifically here though.

I also don't really get your question about one girl's opinion versus another because you made it very vague. Nikki thinks Anita is full of it or something. About what though? The context of what we are talking about right now is that Anita receives massive amounts of harassment. If Nikki would say she doesn't, well... the evidence is against her. Anita posts a lot of her harassment regularly. Not to mention you can just go to her Twitter and see it. The massive anti-Anita harassment campaign is hard to deny. If we're just talking about Anita's videos though, she says like 800 different things throughout the course of them, so I'd have to know what Nikki disagrees with before commenting on that.

I think though you get this sense that people listen to Anita just because she is a woman or something? At least, that seems to be how you are presenting it? I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case I listen to her (sometimes) because she has clearly studied representations in media much more than anyone else I know, and points out trends that make sense to me. She picks some poor examples to demonstrate those trends sometimes sometimes, but I have plenty of my own to fill in the gaps in her work. So, like any decent "teacher", she isn't feeding me information that I blindly soak up, but rather pointing me towards things that I can discover on my own, most of which I already had some vague sense of. In truth most of her videos could have been done by a man (in fact her producer is a male, something her detractors bring up a lot to try to discredit her) without being drastically different, although of course a female perspective on representations of women is more valuable in many ways. But they're usually not about what it feels like as a woman to experience these things so much as just simply pointing out that these things exist, which isn't a particularly gendered thing to point out.

Really, you will be less angry about Anita if you stop thinking of her as some scam artist forcing her views on people and realize that those of us who agree with her points actually agree with her points because we used our minds to come to the conclusion that she is (more or less) right. I know from past conversations that you think she wields some unfair power over the minds of gamers or something like that, but you know, it's pretty condescending to gamers to assume that they aren't using their own minds when they watch her videos and decide she may be onto something.

Ultimately I think this is where a lot of her larger detractors, like Sargon and such, fail. They try to present themselves as the voice of reason or whatever, but they still just run around harping on her like she is some evil scam artist. Then they wonder why they aren't being presented equal attention / space by the gaming press to present their point of view. Well, you need a clear point of view that isn't just attacking an opponent. Just simply being anti-Anita and wanting to trash her as a person is not a point of view.

On another note, I find it interesting and perhaps a bit telling how few of Anita's popular (as in, have pretty big Internet followings) detractors have really tried to present their own case that these tropes don't exist in any meaningful way and that games don't have an issue with sexism in any meaningful way. I get that it is tough to "prove" the negative but if you're going to claim someone is way off you should present the case. They don't seem to want to do much beyond attack her character and try to debunk her by picking apart her details. The latter is fine I suppose but kind of empty without presenting an alternative take and fully supporting it.

I've thought about why this is and none of my conclusions are particularly kind to these people.

@Zero

Nikki finds Anita to be extremely hypocritical, like when she's talking about the way that women don't have to be because of society..but her hair is perfect, she's got big hoop earrings, she's all done up, "perfectly" arched eyebrows, etc. "She didn't even need to be on camera." Which is a good point. The guy from this group of videos only had still shots of himself. And he was picking his nose.

And its hard for me not to think of her as a scam artist when she "oh, for meeeee?!"'d on Kickstarter, happily taking THOUSANDS of dollars from people who had no problem giving it to her. Hey Zero, how much money are you being paid right now to educate ME about videogames? How much is ANYONE here being paid to talk about videogames? Not one damn cent. (No, I'm not talking about advertising for site upkeep.)

I have no idea who this Sargon character is, but you certainly talk about them a lot.


Pool time. Slug man.

Anita has never said people can't present themselves well so I don't see much weight in that argument.

If you think making "thousands" to produce something makes you a scam artist you must have some serious issues with Capitalism. Join me in taking down the system!

In reality though if we had readers who would pay us to write would I accept the money? Heck yeah I would, and I'd make sure everyone writing gets a share. What'd be wrong about that?! People need money to survive. Some make it collecting garbage, some make it programming computers, some make it writing and / or producing other media content. A job is a job.

You can be darn sure I'm going to do a Kickstarter for the game I'm working on. Y-Alpha and I have been working hard for years now on this sucker. We deserve compensation. I mean, assuming there is a market for it. I'd love to live in a world where I can just dedicate a the time I want to making things without thinking about getting paid but if you don't have income you end up on the streets begging for change. Not exactly the best position to be in to produce media content.