Jimquisition: Gamer Guys

[JarinArenos]

Also, i fail to see the "false equivalence", could you explain what you mean?

http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/05-the-death-of-snkrs/falseequivalence/

 

[Miroluck]

Also, i fail to see the "false equivalence", could you explain what you mean?

http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/05-the-death-of-snkrs/falseequivalence/

Well, that's interesting.
Read this:
http://just-smith.tumblr.com/post/52991271199/male-superheroes-are-never-objectified

Quote: "This picture is an example of a popular argument. It has 55k notes, and text posts making the same point probably have even more."

 

[Neonit]

Also, i fail to see the "false equivalence", could you explain what you mean?

http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/05-the-death-of-snkrs/falseequivalence/

Oh yes, its a cool comic about the difference between male power fantasy and sexualization of women in gaming.
Now, how does this relate to the issue at hand? Because i honestly see no line between what i said before and this comic.

 

[Dragonbums]

Correct me if I'm wrong Jim, but I think a lot of people are unaware of the huge shitstorm that happened on your Destroctoid article regarding a Legend of Zelda game revolving around Zelda.

Was filled with a lot of people claiming that it would be a bunch of croc poop and what not.

I think a disclaimer either at the end of your video or in the description would do a lot to clear up the confusion.

 

[Lightknight]

So... there is a general suspicion of these people rather than a hate in general or desire to keep them out? That's kinda weird but hardly worth mentioning.

Maybe we're actually talking about the fighting genre's community. That's make complete sense.

No, it's pretty much the broader community.

As outraged as people were at that neckbeard who sniffed his teammate, nothing he said was that far out of line with what girls are normally told to deal with or get out.

Well, our culture hasn't exactly been known for social aptness, particularly around women. We do have extremely anti-social or just plain awkward members in our ranks. Women are going to have to expect to run into those kinds of people when at nerd-centric events but I don't think there's a general overall culture that believes women must allow themselves to be molested by strangers in some way.

I do think there's a lot of bitterness that some people are holding onto. Like when they find out that just being a nerd isn't what is keeping them from finding a woman now that women are becoming more common in our culture. It's a lot easier to have something to blame like the kind of things you're passionate about but things get more difficult when you've got to accept that your social awkwardness is to blame. So when a guy at a conferrence is the 100th+ guy to walk up to a girl (who has been badgered the whole conferrence because she's a girl) and gets a cold shoulder then these are the kinds of things they think. It's not much different from when a guy dismisses a girl as just being a lesbian if she rejects him even though the kind of mentality that would require that kind of thinking is much more likely to blame.

But do you generally have evidence that our culture as a whole is particularly anti-female gamer? I feel like this would be more some vocal minorities who were personally upset in some way. I only say that because I haven't personally run into this kind of individual and I feel like I would have if it were at all common. Then again, I likely wouldn't befriend individuals who would be that arbitrarily bigotted.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Snip

I'm sorry, I have to disagree entirely. The whole reason we use the label 'Fan' is because its supposed to mean something. If we let people who are not fans, pure and simple, walk around claiming they are and watering down the word, then whats the point in calling yourself a fan anyway? Or indeed arguing anything is truly nothing mattered? Your analogy was faulty because both people are still watching. A better analogy would be those same two people talking about MMA, and the true fan asks if the other saw the last broadcast. The hipster says he loves it, but couldn't believe the Great Dane won best in show because the Border Collie was clearly the superior dog. Get it? They're not talking about the same thing!

Personally I don't watch Dr. Who and more importantly I don't claim to! If a friend asks me if I saw this episode or that, I say no I'm not a fan. I don't go into an attention grabbing song and dance number about how the Doctor and Will Smith uploaded a virus to the Alien mothership and the President led an fighter-jet attack. People would call bullshit, as well they should. If someone like me can call themselves a Dr. Who fan having never seen an episode and indeed never intending to, then no one is a fan of anything. Fandom does not exist anymore because we have dropped the definition of 'fan'. Without it, everyone is just dom.

 

[Phasmal]

Ok, all of you who believe the fake gamer girl thing, ask yourself this, and actually think about it.

Are these fake women MORE of a problem than female members of our community getting a nasty grilling for no reason other than their gender? Are they more of an issue than the hostility thrown at anyone female for speaking about games without sitting the written exam?

I really freaking doubt it.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

While a lot of you got into gaming and internet culture because you liked it, I got into it because there simply wasn't anywhere else that I could go

You could have gone into academia, perhaps become a research scientist or something? I'm pretty sure Stephen Hawking doesn't catch a lot of shit from his colleagues for his disabilities and quirks.

I'm curious as to why you thought gaming and "internet culture" was your only refuge. You could have read books, like we did in the old days.

And really, the initial idea of nerd culture was that it was a place for people like me who couldn't fit in anywhere else.

I don't agree. Nerds are simply people who are intelligent and have strong (often obsessive) interests in things. I don't really believe in the concept of "nerd culture" - nerds are individuals with a whole variety of different interests. That's what makes them special. Conflating them all into a single culture is problematic.

I'm not saying it's right, and I'm not saying that it's entirely rational, but the alternative is that we lose the one place in the world that we can treated like humans, instead of robots who exist to be made fun of. And if society would just stop fucking treating autistics like we're inferior, then maybe we'd stop being so fucking scared of the general populous.

A good start might be treating other people like humans, rather than stereotypes such as "girls" or "frat-boys," etc. You didn't like it when people threw shit at you, so why do it to others? Sure, it's difficult to lead by example, but people who do so, tend to end up better over the long-term. People will respect and like you for acting decently, even if it doesn't get immediate results.

I really don't care what happens though, just trying to give insight into why some people might be so strongly opposed to the notion of feminism coming into gaming.

I don't think it's so much about "feminism coming into gaming" as being about how gamers should stop acting like such dicks. There's no feminism required to do that.

 

[Miroluck]

Are these fake women MORE of a problem than female members of our community getting a nasty grilling for no reason other than their gender? Are they more of an issue than the hostility thrown at anyone female for speaking about games without sitting the written exam?

I agree that we shouldn't examine female newcomers on their fandom knowledge just because of their gender. I think we should have exams for every newcomer, whether they're male or female.

 

[Phasmal]

Are these fake women MORE of a problem than female members of our community getting a nasty grilling for no reason other than their gender? Are they more of an issue than the hostility thrown at anyone female for speaking about games without sitting the written exam?

I agree that we shouldn't examine female newcomers on their fandom knowledge just because of their gender. I think we should have exams for every newcomer, whether they're male or female.

Who said anything about newcomers? I still get the grilling as if I were a newcomer.
And I'm really sad that people think loving games needs an entrance exam. How is someone supposed to learn if they are shunned for not knowing enough?

 

[Miroluck]

Are these fake women MORE of a problem than female members of our community getting a nasty grilling for no reason other than their gender? Are they more of an issue than the hostility thrown at anyone female for speaking about games without sitting the written exam?

I agree that we shouldn't examine female newcomers on their fandom knowledge just because of their gender. I think we should have exams for every newcomer, whether they're male or female.

Who said anything about newcomers? I still get the grilling as if I were a newcomer.

That's unfair. Entrance quiz would help with that too - if person who passed it would recieve some kind of certificate or ID or something.

 

[Miroluck]

How is someone supposed to learn if they are shunned for not knowing enough?

Well, they would not be banned or anything, they could always learn more and try again next year.

 

[Schadrach]

I'm a bit lost here. Are "gamer girls" really such an issue? I've actually never met any of these caricature gamer girlz that some people seem to be complaining about. What year is this?

They exist, are relatively rare, but draw attention disproportionate to their raw numbers because that's largely why they're there, for attention.

The whole rigmarole about them basically amounted to a tiny handful proclaiming that they absolutely do not and cannot exist, an even smaller handful believing that anyone who accepts that they do exist is claiming that all girls/women interested in games are part of them (IOW that women can't genuinely be interested in games, which is utterly absurd), and the larger swarm of fairly predictable white knights and gender ideologues on both sides arguing regardless of evidence. Oh and a couple of madmen who belonged to the Codename 47 School of Subcultural Membership, where donning an appropriate item of clothing makes you part of a subcultural group.

Really, it's a lot of stink over the couple percent of girl gamers who are Gamer Girls(tm).

Once again, the problem is not the fact that fake gamer PEOPLE are annoying, it is the fact that they DO actually ruin our culture. Remember what happened to Metal in the 80s when it got all popular with the poseurs? Yeah, exactly. The influx of poseurs in gamer culture IS actually ruining the culture itself because their numbers allow them to sway the industry to their shallow opinions (such as "MAKE MORE DUDEBRO SHOOTERS!"). This is what happened to Metal (leaving all the good Metal to be made in Europe and to struggle in the underground in America) and this is what is happening to geek culture now.

So you are COMPLETELY missing the point when you think it's about us just being butthurt for some arbitrary reason that I don't know what you think it is. The point is that these poseurs ARE hurting the culture, and once they exhaust themselves and get bored of it, they'll leave, leaving it devastated beyond recovery and putting us back in the underground with them making fun of us.

History shows this is what happens when an underground culture becomes popular then gets kicked out of the popular scene.

The whole "subculture gets popular, then gets kicked out of it's own scene, then something else becomes popular and what's left implodes because the new guys left for the new 'in' thing and the old guard was driven away" thing tends to follow a pretty consistent pattern. We're what, about halfway through the process now?

You know what, buddy? I think you hit the nail on the head. You see, why can't people like you make an article on the escapist, rather than people such as Jim, from time to time. Some of the stuff you write hits the point so hard, it fucking HURTS!

I fairly recently saw one of the people who frequently post in these threads suggest that sexism in gaming is a "dirty secret" of the community and industry. I disagree with that presumption -- instead I think that the real "dirty secret" of "geeky" subcultures is that ultimately they were built by, for, and around people who are passionate about and delve deep into escapism, and the sorts of people who do that are rarely undamaged beforehand.

 

[UNHchabo]

Obviously this is a spin on the fake gamer girl malarkey going about. I honestly have a good example of a fake nerd girl. There was a girl in my bio-class last semester who after talking with her for a few days admitted she was a hard-core Star Wars fan, loved the movies, read the books and played all the games. I was genuinely impressed. But then! She says that she and her roommate were going to get a pet ferret. Jokingly I asked if she was going to name it 'Boba Ferret" and she looked at me, dead eyed and asked if that was from something. I said "No, its a spin on Boba Fett's name." "Whose Boba Fett?" And then she moved on, saying they were going to name the little ferret 'Whiskers'.

Now I don't know her reasoning behind making up the Star Wars bit, and I honestly don't care. It was painfully obvious to me she just made up the 'I'm a Star Wars fan' and thats enough for me. Are all fans/gamer girls like this? Hell no. But really, please stop pretending there aren't two catagories. There are and please not men can fall under it too. If it makes you feel better, we can label them 'True Fans/Gamers' and 'Hipster Fans/Gamers'. See? Gender neutral and implies that one group is a fan because they truly enjoy it, while another is doing so ironically or whatever hispters do

It sounds like the ferret conversation happened later; maybe she didn't make the connection that you were making a Star Wars reference.

Or maybe she just never learned Boba Fett's name, because it's said only once in the original movies, in a line by Han that's easy to miss. It's possible that she has read a bunch of the books, but they either all took place before Boba Fett was born, or don't reference him in any way. I've read a few of the Rogue Squadron books, and I'm pretty sure he's never mentioned. Maybe if you'd mentioned Jango Fett she would have got the reference, especially since he's mentioned by name much more often, both in the prequels and in certain areas of the expanded universe.

 

[Phasmal]

I fairly recently saw one of the people who frequently post in these threads suggest that sexism in gaming is a "dirty secret" of the community and industry. I disagree with that presumption -- instead I think that the real "dirty secret" of "geeky" subcultures is that ultimately they were built by, for, and around people who are passionate about and delve deep into escapism, and the sorts of people who do that are rarely undamaged beforehand.

Actually, I said it USED to be a dirty secret (if you were indeed referring to me, I remember making a post like that recently- if you dont mean me disregard this). It used to be something we all knew went on but didn't really talk about it because we expected everyone to just put up and shut up, which is no longer the case.

You can call people damaged all you like, doesn't get them a `get out of acting like a human being`-free card.
And why why why do people keep talking about female gamers like we just showed up yesterday???

 

[magicmonkeybars]

You know, this was kind of super depressing, made me realize this is no place for people like me.
For all this talk of inclusion and embracing a larger demographic I have never felt more alienated from it.
Like you found a better group of people to populate the culture with and now the old residents are just trash to be shunned and discarded.
This whole video was just a giant " fuck you, you don't belong and you're not wanted."

 

[Rebel_Raven]

You know, this was kind of super depressing, made me realize this is no place for people like me.
For all this talk of inclusion and embracing a larger demographic I have never felt more alienated from it.
Like you found a better group of people to populate the culture with and now the old residents are just trash to be shunned and discarded.
This whole video was just a giant " fuck you, you don't belong and you're not wanted."

I gotta ask what kind of person are you that you feel excluded?

 

[magicmonkeybars]

You know, this was kind of super depressing, made me realize this is no place for people like me.
For all this talk of inclusion and embracing a larger demographic I have never felt more alienated from it.
Like you found a better group of people to populate the culture with and now the old residents are just trash to be shunned and discarded.
This whole video was just a giant " fuck you, you don't belong and you're not wanted."

I gotta ask what kind of person are you that you feel excluded?

The kind that doesn't matter.

 

[II2]

Gamer Guys

Jimquisition travels to another time and another place, examining a world taken over by gamer guys and their testosterone-addled inanity. Something must be done!

Watch Video

Beware alternate universes Jimothy, miniature Fantasy Wilhem Dafoe may betray you there.

 

[Littaly]

I have a new plan for becoming famous on the Internet!
Record myself on webcam, playing games while wearing a tight-fitted T-shirt using my supple smooth body and elegant nipples to sell myself on sex-appeal! It's gonna be great ~