thebakedpotato said:
Rebel_Raven said:
thebakedpotato said:
Aww yeah another one of these threads! Wooohoo!
Honestly what pisses me off about the whole ordeal is that the energy behind it all is misdirected. If both parties approached a different, solvable, remarkable issue like say... curing AIDS; with as much energy, and vitriol as they do debating and arguing and taunting and threatening and soapboxing... That shit would have been cured.
Now I know how the pope must feel about masturbation
To be fair, I think the gender issues in gaming is an easier battle to win vs Aids.
If gender issues in games stopped being an issue, people could move on to other things. Maybe racial variety in games? I'd like to see that take flight. I think it needs to be addressed, but I'm a one battle at a time kind of person.
If the small problems would just go away, we'd have nothing but the larger problems to focus on.
Buuut the small problems, like gender issues in videogames, aren't going away any time soon, few people are in a hurry to fix them, and some people are actually fighting to keep them in.
The battle wages so long as there's something to fight over.
Threads like these are full of reasons why people are hung up on combating the status quo of gaming.
I think you're chasing what you perceive to be easy targets while ignoring the problem as a whole.
Changing video games won't affect the gender inequality in society. However changing society will affect the gender inequality in games.
The feel that I've gotten from Anita's latest video in particular isn't that she wants broad social change, but to have a single media industry display her backward ideal of gender equality.
I can see where you're coming from, but fixing the problem as a whole? I think that'd take hundreds, if not thousands of years. Especially tackleing it all at once, and even more so on a world wide scale.
I'm sure women have been upset about inequities in society for a very long time, but it's only recently in history that we're seeing substantial change, and even then it was mostly in certain areas of the world. There's no doubt areas in te world as backwards today as they were 2 millenia ago. Other places are playing catch up, but what they're catching up to is still in the race.
Honestly, while painting my desire to change the gaming industry as a societal matter makes it sound more glorious, I'm not looking to change society as a whole with changing videogames. It's generally why I don't bring up societal impacts in my points.
I'm not discounting the possibility that there may be changes in society when games get more egalitarian, but I'm not betting too heavily on it.
If I were to consider what benefit to society there might be, we might have a better unity between males, and females as they're more and more likely to work together over videogames, and learn to get along better. It -could- promote better teamwork in general. It might not be this generation that benefits, but consider the generations that grow up with inclusive media?
It's like dropping a pebble in a pond. It might not seem significant, but the ripples could spread to the edges of the pond.
Making it a societal matter, or not, I'd still say it's still an easier battle than fixing world wide views on sexism. I mean it's a pain doing it on a small scale like videogames. I mean it's still happening. This seemingly insignificant matter is still meeting resistance, and is still being talked about. Sure it's mking progress, but if even this tiny matter in the grand scale of things is taking this long, then I have to believe it's a measuring stick for how long larger issues will take.
For all the issues I take on, the difficulty would just be multiplied for every other facet added. The more on my plate the more expert I need to be in more areas, making the battle far more difficult. If I didn't become specialized in a certain field, I'd be poorly equipped vs someone who is. Kinda funny that people would argue against equality, but they do.
That isn't to say that I'm expert on even trying to straighten out videogames, and I've been at it a while on my own.
And I think my point stands, that so long as people have issues with female representation, this isn't going away. The only way I can see to fix the issue is via more variety among female representation, and playable women. Going the opposite direction will just make people more chatty about it. Taking steps away from the goal is basically taking steps away from stopping people from talking about this matter.
The only way I see to go is forward.
When this issue is solved, it'll be one less problem, and we can move on. This issue might not be the nail that sticks up the most, but once hammered, it'll be a nail we don't have to worry about, and we can focus more on nails sticking out more, perhaps with some better security/support as we do go after more important nails.
You don't build a house all at once. You don't move a dresser all at once as it's generally easier to take the drawers out. You certainly don't fight wars on 2 fronts.
And while this might be a small scale problem, who's to say some people aren't taking this on as a side mission while they try to fix larger problems?
Even with some people focused heavily on gaming's gender issues lets not forget there are others taking on larger issues.