Racecarlock said:
Not the woman who dared to make a video complaining about the depiction of females in entertainment and getting a shit ton of kitchen jokes, death threats, and rape threats for it.
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.
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?
Racecarlock said:
Because anita is jack thompson even though jack thompson got disbarred and anita doesn't even have the powers of a low level lawyer.
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:
Like how christians are oppressed by gay people.
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:
And no, by the way, I don't think they faked their harassment. Because the evidence to that effect is shoddy at best and I think it's just a bullshit excuse to not take any of the harassment these women are getting seriously.
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.
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.
AdonistheDark said:
About TLOU, I've been wondering since The Professional what it is that necessitates the protected child/teen be a girl versus a boy. What is it about the dynamic that makes many men who aren't particularly drawn to female characters in general so enamored with the father/daughter dynamic?
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.
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.