Ninjamurai said:
There is at least one difference between Anita Sarkeesian & her die-hard supporters, and Jack Thompson & his die-hard supporters. Anita didn't exactly try to *force* change, at least not by law like Jack did. I see a lot of Anita's detractors using flawed comparisons to quickly get their opinion past. (Though there are also some (semi-)supporters who are using flawed/imperfect comparisons & reasons as well...)
If you want to inform people that her videos are bad, you need to do a better job than barely saying anything. (You also have to not say too much, or else you'll sound like a crazy person (For example, when talking about how her videos may be objectively bad, don't start talking about Cultural Marxism, or else you will look like a crazy person even if you have good intentions...))
Sure, Feminist Frequency could cause negative change to gaming via their influence, but influence can't be changed by screaming & stomping. You need to be calm & reasonable, even if you think your opponent is not. Jack Thompson wanted to cause change to videogames by brute force, so that everyone would have to live by his rules. Even if the worst ideas out of a Fem. Freq. video was applied to games, at least they would have been applied by misguided developers, and not because the government forced them to.
She tried to 'force' change by positioning herself as a moral arbiter - as a judge of what is good enough, and what not good enough. Well, she tried.
As for why her videos are bad? My favorite example is her "women in the fridge" video, where she talks about games using plot devices consisting of women getting hurt or killed, as motivations for the player character to get mad/get even/go on a quest of vengeance as a bad thing.
The trick is that she just says that's a bad thing. At no point does she stop and go "You know, wanting to save and help other people is a basic human drive - that its mainly men saving women is a bit one-sided, but ultimately wanting to help other people isn't a bad thing" - no, in her videos it is 100% a bad thing, with nothing good in it. Thats part of why her videos are so bad.
Plus, in the same video, she applies deceptive editing of game footage, to make it appear as if certain games actually encourage players to kill their damsels and then just give a reward for it.
In one clip, you see an FPS game where a player character has to rescue his girlfriend who's been surgically grafted onto a monster boss that you have to fight. She shows you fighting the monster, and then cuts to saying something like "and then finally the game forces you to kill the damsel, because that's just what you have to do to continue in the game" as if the game is some kind of cold-hearted killed simulator.
what they left on the cutting room floor was a cutscene where the player character pleads with his girlfriend, wanting to cut her lose and save her, but the girlfriend insists that he shoot her because she cannot be saved. What's that? Female agency, choosing her own path? Ya, that kind of context is left out in a lot of Sarkeesian's videos. And there are tons of youtube vids showing this.
Another similar example was when Sarkeesian talked about one of the hitman games, and claimed that because you COULD kill some strippers and drag around the bodies, or stuff their bodies into ice boxes for hiding, then you as a player would not be able to not kill them and do that stuff with. Also showing montages of clips from games like Fallout New Vegas where a male player character shoots random female NCPs and whatnot - because hey... fuck context, just show that its possible to hurt women, amirite?
Never mind that in the same hitman clip you actually see a point score penatly for unnecesary killing of NPCs and whatnot.
She basically debunks herself in her own videos.