Thank God for you. Seriously. Though as a christian, dude, we don't all hate gay people that is just the cray cray extremeists like anything.Racecarlock said:
Is it time for feminists to step off our hobby?
- Thread starter Mandalore_15
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No, but they should start focusing on more concerning issues like wage inequality, and etc. I am suprised you have people mad at GTA5 not having female characters when ther are still more important issues that affect them more.
I think they came up with the idea with the best of intentions (i.e. to differentiate her from Mario) but yeah, I can see how that's problematic.HarmonyAngelo said:
If they gave it another try, they could go with a new mechanic though, that doesn't rely on a stereotype like that. I like to think they'd wanna try something new anyway, since it's been so long.
Also, I'm scared of what my inbox is gonna look like after replying to a thread like this twice...
Can you imagine there was a time where I actually enjoyed political subtext in fantasy and sci-fi?
Now you can't look anywhere without capitalism this, terrorism that, feminism this, racism that, classism this, warcrimes that.
Remember when people did things for fun, instead of turning their hobby into just another zealous cult that harasses other people based on what they are, not what they do?
I'm so sick of it all.
Now you can't look anywhere without capitalism this, terrorism that, feminism this, racism that, classism this, warcrimes that.
Remember when people did things for fun, instead of turning their hobby into just another zealous cult that harasses other people based on what they are, not what they do?
I'm so sick of it all.
I agree there, I hope they'd try again and not rely on that. Then I'd be super happy.ScrabbitRabbit said:
Haha, me too. XD
And that still isn't censorship because if the person who said that in question(ala feminists in this instance.) has zero power to enforce that (they don't.) than nothing is being censored. The dev who goes through with those demands did so of his/her/their own voilition.valium said:
Similar to how Rockstar for instance didn't put X in game because the fans didn't like that feature. Would you call that censorship now?
You do realize there are PLENTY of feminists who focus on those very things right? Like, do you not read articles realting to women issues and femnism outside of videogames?Gergar12 said:
There are a lot more feminists who don't give two fucks about videogames than there are feminists who give two fucks about videogames. We are not a hivemind. We are a extremely diverse group of people so at the same time you have femnists interested in videogames you have feminists interested in film, business, art, politics, et. etc. etc.
Seriously?Mandalore_15 said:
In an industry where games are, and for most of their history have been, developed, made, marketed, produced and published mostly by men, for men, you're asking if the issue of sexism might be a storm in a tea cup?
No. Instead, is it time for us to step off the feminists? Is it time we had a reality check? Ask yourselves this: how much has gaming actually been impacted by the so called "feminazis" and the constant shit-flinging that seems to be especially dominating this website right now? How many actual game developers have been attacked or protested against outside of blogs or posting boards because their game's protagonist has been a straight white male?
I say let the feminists rip things up as much as they want. It's way past fucking time the standard audience of games switched from 14-year old ADD boys to a more diverse group.
Except that argument only works when the game is story-focused enough when the gender of the protagonist actually matters. What about fighting games? Or games like Painkiller where the story is little more than a framing device?Mandalore_15 said:
I'd make a comment about the irony of a guy who built his fame on playing the archtypal stereotype of a "gamer" complaining that gamers are being stereotyped, but he comes off as sincere here.Bolo The Great said:
I hope to god he didn't mean stuff like voting and equal pay, but that "IRL" worries me.whiskeystrike said:
What I love the most has to be people saying 'this game' was affected! (See, the new Lara Croft as that's the one people have brought up most)McMarbles said:
The massive problem though is that if you're going to argue the gender/sexuality level of the character doesn't matter, you can't argue the game was ruined by making her look physic look humanly achievable/making her more 'female friendly'.
Developers will continue doing whatever makes them money, a couple feminist blogs won't make a dent on their profits, so I doubt they'll be hard pressed to do anything.
It's the Internet and sites like this one that are making this into a 'thing', because it brings them traffic and that means more revenue. It's just a different kind of yellow journalism, which creates controversies out of thin air and everyone benefits from the collective uproar, that never ending pissing contest of who can pretend to be more offended, just for virtual attention and money.
It doesn't help any cause. At all. Don't believe me? One word: Kony.
It's the Internet and sites like this one that are making this into a 'thing', because it brings them traffic and that means more revenue. It's just a different kind of yellow journalism, which creates controversies out of thin air and everyone benefits from the collective uproar, that never ending pissing contest of who can pretend to be more offended, just for virtual attention and money.
It doesn't help any cause. At all. Don't believe me? One word: Kony.
Well, I mean, I compared them to dime novels and C movies for a reason. And I think that's the best of what gaming has to offer. I think it can offer better, but what we see hailed as masterpieces are usually quite bad, still.Vault101 said:
That's not to say I want gaming to be like movies. I mean, I enjoy a cinematic game now and again, but that's not my goal or my desire. The point here was more the comparison of Ellie to any character in any medium. When that comparison comes up, I feel it fair to make the critique, but I'm not looking for novels or movies. I'd also point out that I don't necessarily go for highbrow stuff. I'm playing Warriors Orochi 3 right now and loving it. Not the stuff of legend by far, but it doesn't have to be.
Thing is, characters tend to be weak because of the media itself. Look at protagonist lists: the top spots tend to go to people who are nearly blank slates, like Gordon Freeman and Link. This isn't automatically a flaw, either, but it can be. The silent protagonist can be fun, but s/he doesn't necessarily lend to character development.
That's what I was riffing off of.
It just read as though you were inherently trying to distance yourself from the concept, something I see pretty commonly. I may have even been influenced by havng recently watched Log1c Bombed's video on Thunderf00t, since he basically said "it's because of you I can't call myself a feminist." A sentiment I find baffling and a little inane. Point being I may have read more than what was there, and for that I apologise. As to where I'm coming from....Not The Bees said:
I dislike backing down from things just because someone slings a name at me. It's worse when it's a word I don't have a problem with. I don't go out of my way to label myself, but when people started calling me a feminist, my response was basically, "screw it. Why not?" I'm not going to back down from any argument because I'm called a feminist. Or a liberal (I'm not a Democrat, not even technically). People want to use these words as slurs to shut down conversation. That's sort of where this thread comes in in the first place. It's us and them, in this case "gamers" and "feminists."
My point was more that the awareness that comes from these are usually based on loaded studies with false equivalence. The big rape comparison done in the US is done between statistics of penetrative rape for women vs any kind of sexual abuse for adult men, for example, and then people go around talking about how much worse off it is for men. And that's dishonest. That's like saying women are raped more because rape requires the victim's vagina to be penetrated. If one sufficiently loads the conditions, one can demonstrate anything. See also: claims that scientists once met consensus that the earth was going through global cooling. Or any of a thousand other examples, that just sprung to mind.
Thing is, there's no management as far as I'm aware. I joke about our glorious overlady, but there isn't even a single set of ideals. A week or so back, I spent a ton of time defending the notion of porn against someone who was insisting to women they were being degraded and dehumanised regardless of how they felt on the subject. And I know a lot of feminists feel different.
There's never a good sentence that starts with "no offense," but...I'm not sure how to phrase this. It just seems weird that you mention issues of bodily autonomy, and you place this as a higher concern. I mean, I'm not dictating what you can or cannot feel, but I do have trouble wrapping my head around it.
That's true of any group, whether labeled or not. My family are right wing Christians who swear their not right wing Christians, and they get very angry at me. Hell, I was called a Nazi before I'd even been on the internet or heard of Godwin's law, because I supported socialised medicine back before it was cool *hipster shades* I should note that only really goes for the US, since I'm aware practically every other industrial nation has had it, many since before I was born. Still, I'm pretty much only even a liberal by US standards. But to them, I'm left of Lenin, the kind of scum who is off eating babies and forcing straights to gay marry. Or something. I don't know. I tune them out mostly.
I don't carry that with me and hold it against all Christians or conservatives.
What confuses me is the original diction
I was pretty sure we were on the same page, except that confuses me. I don't think anyone's saying it's got to be women.
It's not even what we identify with, mind. I'm in favour of more people of colour, though I'm fair skinned. And this is part of where the "SJW" tag comes in. I get accused of championing causes that aren't mine, but honestly, I went through Saints Row as a Hispanic dude. Hell, when SR2 added in female models, I kept him for multiplayer and made a separate, female avatar for single player--a tradition I kept for the remainder of the series so far. I like flexibility in my games, and also, I empthaise with the people who do say "why can't I play as someone who looks like me?" It's not an unreasonable demand, so I'm onboard, even if I never particularly sat down and said "gaming needs more blackl/brown" people!
Though I'm half native, and would appreciate (not demand, mind) the occasional option when we're dealing with skin presets. The closest I can get is the hispanic/latino preset. It's not someone who looks like me, but it'd still be cool.
Just for the record, I voted for McCain prior to 2008. Primaries, but still.
Good luck on finishing your stuff, though. I've finished two novels and I just need to get organised enough to get them published. I won't pretend I'm an awesome writer, because I'm just writing dime novel fiction (more proof to the above that I don't have anything against things I liken to dime novels).
On that note, and in the line of this sort of discussion, one of the reasons I find these critiques interesting is they actually do make me think about what I'm doing. Not just feminism, either. I read TV Tropes sometimes, just to broaden my horizons. The end result isn't always change, but I've sometimes found myself falling into holes without realising it. And I think you can accept criticism and still make something you want to make. Which is more about the metanarrative that's been going on around here, but still. I mean, if the Saints Row devs can think about this sort of thing and still come up with Saints Row IV, I think we're pretty safe.
Oh you say that, but I know your type. You just want to copy my identity and commit crimes. NEVER AGAIN!
(I kid, of course)
No worries. I didn't read it as angry. More "passionate," I guess. I only really tend to be bothered when I think someone is arguing in bad faith or something similar. Even if I disagree, I have trouble holding it against someone I think is being genuine. Of course, I will still disagree, but this is the internet, so it's expected--nay, demanded!
Funny you should meention the devs, as they seem to be more receptive than the community.Malpraxis said:
I have heard of that slanted/loaded study several times, asked for study itself and didn't get the answer. I looked around the net, didn't find any study that would fit your description. Can you point me in direction of that study?Zachary Amaranth said:
Anyone who says anything remotely controversial on the internet gets death threats and the like, proportional to the size of the audience. I once got death threats for posting on the WoW forums regarding class balance (and my position was that the people complaining about a thing were right that it needed fixed, but that something else needed to be fixed first, or else another spec would be unable to raid because the thing they wanted fixed was the only reason that other spec was allowed in raids at all). I got people making alts on my server to /tell me death threats repeatedly over the following weeks.Racecarlock said:
I'd be willing to bet you that if we looked at someone who was as far from your martyred Saint Sarkeesian as possible but also said controversial things loudly over the internet that they'd get their share of threats too -- how about TheAmazingAtheist? He seems about as far from Anita as possible politically, and he's male so he shouldn't get harassed, right?
She's not a lawyer, but she's damn good at manipulating social media and capitalizing on victimhood. Her goal is ultimately the same though -- gaming doesn't meet her delicate sensibilities, so she wants to push it until it does. She's just doing it by pretending to be an academic and banking on victimhood to cover up the fact that she consistently misrepresents things, plagiarizes, and occasionally outright lies. It's shockingly effective, because it gets her followers to ignore any deceit in her "research" or any gaping logical flaws in her arguments by simply claiming anyone who disagrees with her is a misogynist, and therefore wrong.Racecarlock said:
If the gay people in question were trying to force and/or shame the Christians in question to let them have a gay marriage in their church? Then you'd be a lot closer. I'm for gay marriage, but I was also for that baker who didn't want to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding because gay marriage was against his beliefs. I'm all for diversity in games, but I'm against trying to shame people or manufacture a public outrage whenever someone wants to make or play a game that doesn't meet someone else's delicate sensibilities. Don't like it? Play something else.Racecarlock said:
There's plenty of evidence that WizardChan did not harass Zoe Quinn when she put her game up on Greenlight, and that she claimed there was is probably the reason it was greenlit. Since then is another story.Racecarlock said:
Of course, claiming that they got harassed says something about the gaming community as a whole has an obvious problem. Let's assume harassment, and let's even assume it was a coordinated campaign of harassment. How many harassers do you estimate there were? I'd say thousands at the most, considering that many of them will have made multiple burner accounts. How many gamers are there? 10s of millions, as a low estimate.
Which means that we'd be measuring the proportion of the community that are harassers in hundredths of a percent. Single digits per 10,000 people.
To make a comparison, the violent crime rate in the US runs from 14.7 violent crimes per 10,000 people (Maine) to 113 violent crimes per 10,000 people (District of Columbia), per state/district. 213.7 violent crimes per 10,000 people in the most violent city, Detroit. Which means that people are claiming gaming community harassers are an epidemic because they are somewhere between tenths to hundredths as common as violent crime.
Would you argue the black community is inherently criminal? Of course not, because that's discriminatory, wrong, and painting a wide group of people with the sins of the tiny minority that are the worst, but that's what you do by claiming the gaming community is inherently misogynist and harassment prone, paint a wide group of people with the sins of the worst of their number. To cut off the counterargument I can practically hear you typing from here, no, I am not saying that gamers are like black people, I am saying that the people claiming misogynistic harassment is endemic in the gaming community are committing the same logical failure as a racist claiming that criminal behavior is endemic to black people. I'm not comparing gamers to black people, I'm comparing people making that argument to racists.
Women and girls are given more sympathy for being in bad situations (not just in media but in real life -- which is why for example, women get shorter prison sentences for a given crime than men), which makes a daughter a more sympathetic character than a son. IOW, because people are subconsciously sexist in one of those ways that benefits women.AdonistheDark said:
Bad things are seen as worse when they happen to women. Bad things are seen as less bad when they're done by women.
Add that to the father/child dynamic being a case of "write what you know", and there you go.
This is directed at everyone who shares the opinion, not just you but:Andy Shandy said:
"Hey, if it gets more non-straight white males* in games, then sure they can stay as long as they like"
Why do we want this?
I mean sure, its not a bad thing if the character is different but I can't name a single game where the characters sexuality, gender or race would change a bloody thing.
Well except maybe gender, but it normally wouldn't change the game itself in any meaningful way.
A game is not going to be held up or even majorly effected by any of these factors. I'd prefer they put effort into the personality/character of the protag rather than what they look like.
Or hell, heres an idea; The gameplay!
Feminism as it is is not the problem, it never was. Feminism is and has always been a positive thing (yes, I'm a guy). The problem is either crazy people who use a positive movement as a platform for their own batshit ideas or bastards who use it for their own profit. Also the problem is people who use video games, them still being the new kid on the block compared to literature, theater and TV, as a scapegoat for their own political agenda.
This. Feminism honestly needs to start policing itself because the "defenders" are just as vitriolic and aggressive as the attackers.RealRT said:
Just like how "gamers" are SO SUPER SEXIST YOU GUYS, "feminsts" are just as bad.
People really need to learn the difference between the super vocal minority and the people with an actual point.
And it's getting very tiring having to repeat this.
Honestly, for myself, I'm just sick of seeing the same 20-30 year old white guy with (probably) brown hair.Trippy Turtle said:
For those that aren't "the norm", I imagine it will be nice for them to have some representation. I have no idea how that would feel obviously, so perhaps someone who isn't a straight white male would be able to explain better.