JarinArenos said:
Westboro Baptist, for all the publicity they get, is a far smaller percentage of the religious population than the slimy underbelly of the gaming populace seems to be (compare 100 or so WB members and well more than half the US being "religious" identifying).
Do you think the Westboro Baptists are the only people who feel the way they feel? Do you think every moron fighting for creationism in public schools is a member of the WBC? Are all of the horrible "Christian" comments in comments sections and on message boards across the internet coming from 100 or so WB members?
Isn't it just as likely that the online gaming population features intolerant and abusive assholes at roughly the same rate of any other subset of the population? And that our perception of this rate is warped/magnified by the echo chamber of "enlightened video game journalism" continually recycling the same tired story over and over?
I happen to believe that there exists a higher-than-average number of shitheads in gaming culture. I also believe the number is greatly exaggerated by the "minority microphone" of the internet and the click-baiting of a dozen or so increasingly sensationalistic websites. Again, multiple concepts/forces are allowed to exist simultaneously.
And moreover, you don't see the majority of people acting like that because they DO get shamed constantly. You don't see people defending racist assholes for being racist assholes (mostly), or at the very least, they have to be circumspect about it. Yes, anonymity changes things, but if someone starts tossing around racially-charged insults on 90% of web forums, they'll get banned. That isn't unreasonable censorship, that's just cleaning up the trash. Why should gender-based insults be any different? (I mean, the escapist locks down ANY personal insults, after all)
I definitely see people defending racist assholes all the time... online. Usually in those 10% of forums that don't give a fuck about intolerance. These are also the only places I see people defending misogynistic assholes, homophobic assholes, etc., because I don't associate with horrible people in real life and my business doesn't require me to be constantly reaching out to others for evaluation/support. In any business where you are "singing for your supper", so to speak, you will obviously run into horrible people with horrible beliefs saying horrible things - and that goes double (or 1000x, more likely) for internet exchanges. Gaming isn't special in this regard.
It's almost starting to feel incredibly self-absorbed/self-centered, as if gaming journalists realized too late that they settled on a relatively meaningless hobby for a career and are now injecting it with as much gravity as possible through a cycle of manufactured controversy. And before yet another person runs screaming into this exchange to tell me I'm sweeping some massive problem under the rug, I want to stress for the millionth time that is possible for both a problem to exist AND for what I'm saying to be true. The existence of an issue isn't license to misrepresent left and right; I can be hungry AND an idiot for saying "I'm dying of starvation".
FieryTrainwreck said:
Semi-on topic: there seems to be this enormous backlash whenever someone tries to lay out precautions for avoiding harassment, as if preparing for the world as it exists and wishing/working for a better one are somehow mutually exclusive concepts. I can tell my extremely petite younger sister that she shouldn't walk around by herself downtown late at night AND despise the sort of people who would do her harm in that situation - both at the same time. I'm not going to pretend that people don't blame victims, but not everyone offering advice for avoiding harassment is doing so. Some people actually just care about other human beings and want them to be happy, and sometimes that means recognizing the world/environment for what it is WHILE helping to change it for the better.
I can completely understand where you're coming from here. I live in a big-city downtown area, and there's absolutely areas that I wouldn't go wandering around, and would advise others to avoid as well. Sure, if you go there and get mugged it's the attacker's fault, but caution is smart as well. The problem is that avoidance isn't our ONLY option. We have law enforcement. The neighborhood I live in was a rather dangerous place to live just 5 or so years ago, but regular police patrols and other local efforts have greatly improved the area. None of this was accomplished by focusing on avoidance of problems. THAT is why people lash out at "victim blaming", even when it's done with the best of intentions, because it removes the focus from actually fixing anything. Especially in cases like the ones Jim keeps bringing up, where the avoidance method seems to be "don't be a public female figure in the games industry". Drive the scum back to their holes by denying them a voice anywhere else.
My point was that you can, in fact, do both things simultaneously - prepare for/accept what will happen AND work to change the culture that allows such behavior to flourish. You're not automatically an asshole for trying to help people avoid pain because the short-term fix. For example, as a teacher dealing with bullying, I would simultaneously advise a bullied student to steer clear of situations that might generate harassment, short-term, WHILE targeting the harassers for punishment or adjustment in the short-through-long term. This notion that it's got to be all-or-nothing, black-or-white 100% of the time is reductive as hell.
Anyways, none of that really applies to what we're talking about here. The nature of the internet makes for completely new and more complicated issues, and pretending we can apply the same old tactics for combating ignorance and harassment is beyond naive. There is fuck all we can do to stop these people from being assholes anonymously online. You can't police it the same way you'd police a dangerous neighborhood for crime prevention. There is literally no amount of activism or determination that will ever change the behavior of internet trolls. Until people recognize this quite fundamental difference between this particular brand of asshole and the assholes in the past (who could be bullied into conformity through physical/social means), these sorts of journalistic tirades will continue to do nothing but waste our collective time. Continually shining a light on an immutable, if terrible, truth accomplishes nothing - unless, of course, your goal is to generate page hits.
