TWEWYFan said:
I'm with you here Jim. I don't care what someone thinks a person did to them, threatening that person's kids is just completely unacceptable and I think it does paint a very dark picture of the current game culture.
But it doesn't, because it has nothing to do with game culture, not provably anyway.
A female politician in the UK who had the audacity to suggest it'd be a good idea to have more women on our currency was
threatened with rape. Mary Beard, a lady who is a classicist and TV presenter was sent
bomb threats for speaking up about the previous issue as well as others.
Neither of those, nor other many similar stories have anything to do with gaming whatsoever. It is the perceived anonymity that comes with posting online that causes most of these kinds of things. People cannot see their victim, often post under an alias and frequently do not think of the consequences.
The idea that gaming as a hobby might have something to do with this is no different from the people who blame rock music for causing drug addiction and violent media for causing mass shootings.
That is not to say we shouldn't care when people do it, or deal with it, but we should be looking at the root cause, not pointing the finger at one of the many areas where such behaviour occurs. Because if gaming did not exist, the people who sent those threats would still almost certainly be the same kind of people who did the things I linked above.
I think Jim is absolutely spot on with what he says, it is a problem for gaming in the sense that these people are causing issues, and we should deal with it. But it isn't
because of gamers or gaming. We need to be looking at what causes to people behave like this in the first place, and how to deal with it. Not point fingers at gaming, because that is not really any different from what the politicians did after the mass shootings, and that was widely criticised.
OT: Jim, in your opening post you make it sound as though your original idea for the video was interrupted by this story. The thing is, the events happened last year. Jennifer Hepler left Bioware in February of 2012 in fact. I am not suggesting that the points you are wrong, as I mentioned above, I completely agree with what you said. It's just that the reasoning you gave for doing this video seems a little strange. It is not "current news" so I don't understand the seeming urgency.
As for using the word "entitled", you did in fact use it incorrectly, because if we are entitled to something that means we are
right to expect it. The correct term would be having a false sense of entitlement, because that is what thinking you are entitled to something that you are not is.
Retrograde said:
Too bad you didn't feel the pressing need to stand up and be the hero we apparently needed when all the men you mentioned were getting threatened with death, but better late than never I guess.
He did:
An episode based around Phil Fish being harassed.
In fact this one he felt was important enough to do midweek despite having already done his regular episode. You seem to be trying to make this a gender issue when it isn't one, which is ironically what you are accusing Jim of doing.