Zontar said:
Revnak said:
Pretty certain that most people say it reinforces or pushes you towards such views, not that it generates them out of thin air.
And even that assertion has no evidence supporting it in the form of peer reviewed studies.
There is evidence that games and other media can reinforce and effect emotional states. Trying to prove how they effect ideas would likely be unethical in the extreme, so I wouldn't expect such a study to exist.
I am trying to make a game? Does that help? Because, from what I've seen, most people tend not to think that. Female developers who actually go ahead and make games still get told that their opinions and efforts are worthless, and that they should just shut up, even when they are creating and coming up with solutions.
If that's the case from us (GamerGate) why are WE the ones spending hundreds of thousands on getting women into making the games they want to see made, while the same people claiming we need more women in the industry and for the industry to change attack the groups trying to make that change? If change is going to happen, it needs to be bottom up, and while we are trying to actually do that anti seems happy in trying to force a bottom down approach despite the fact it will never work.
So, once again, only you can really fix things, and the people asking you to help and who are doing things themselves are not as important. I have no doubt that the collective of progressive developers have invested more into trying to change this communtiy than work to create one game. That's not to say that that is a bad thing for your movement to have done, but effectively supporting one large kickstarter in a world full of them doesn't make you entirely unique, nor does it diminish the efforts of game developers to be less than your's.
Often the "criticism" they are calling out actually is misogyny, as the hundreds of video "takedowns" of Anita serve as excellent examples of. Much of it is far more flawed than the work it is trying to tear a new one. And given that may of these people have responded to criticism, when it actually amounts to such, I really don't buy what you're saying here.
Of all the people who have responded to her videos with videos of their own, the large majority tend to be simple deconstructions of arguments so poor most of the people who support her goals don't believe them. Name one critic of hers, no matter how logical or irrational, which she has responded to. Name one.
As for the misogyny, I'm going to have to withhold my benefit of the doubt. With that word having been rendered meaningless due to the almost turrets level misuse of it, it's on par with "privilege" for ending discussion.
I haven't watched her videos, so I can't really comment there. She did apparently take down the old video when it became clear that it was problematic.
It only works that way because so many are ignorant of the meanings of the terms. That isn't the fault of the terms, and abandoning them for your sake is arguably more condescending than just using them.
And sometimes people just bust out the same talking points because they're still true. Harassment in online games is a problem. Video Game communities are extremely exclusionary towards women and sexual minorities. Dead or Alive has awful, awful character designs.
Everyone gets harassed online, it's a result of the nature of the internet. There's nothing special about that which women and "sexual minorities" receive other then the fact that the proportion of those who have skin that's too thin to handle it is apparently much higher with them.
Yeah, people should just get a thicker fucking skin! That's the problem! Trans people, homosexuals, women, they don't need to be treated better, they need to stop being huge pussies!
Fuck, this is something my CoD addicted brother is able to notice, that the abuse experienced by women in those games is especially bad, and he isn't some high-minded SJW or anything, he's a pretty moderate dude who just plays games to avoid stress at home. He is exactly the kind of guy who's supposed to just not care about these issues and go back to just playing his games, and he sees the problem. What blinds you to it?
And if you want evidence of exclusion towards sexual minorities, look no further than this fucking site. We have plenty of blatant transphobes trying to argue that anything other than their binary concept of sex and gender is a fantasy no different than having people go around saying they're fucking dragons (in the literal sense as well).
Your comment about Dead or Alive is also a subjective one. I've never played the games, don't intent to, don't care for it. If it succeeds it succeeds, if it fails it fails, but I won't help it by buying it. It doesn't effect me and it doesn't effect anyone else. If everyone acted like that there's be a lot less complaining on the internet, but I find it unlikely that will ever happen.
Complaining. Fucking. Works. It gets shit done. Developers don't listen to the silent majority. The silent majority is always an excuse, never a cause. Always complain. Nobody will listen to complaints that aren't fucking made.
You are not entitled to a platform means that nobody has to give you one. I thought that was obvious.
Given what the platforms we use today are, no, no it was not obvious.
A forum dedicated to rape survivors does not need to humor somebody trying to say that drunk rape isn't real. Sorry, that isn't censorship, that's removing the shit from your community. If it creates some hugbox or whatever you feel like calling it, fine, but people don't have to let you into their circle, people can kick you out, and that isn't censorship. If some "burn all fags" type tried to insert themself into my circle of friends, I would go out of my way to get everybody to reject them, even if they were polite about it. A forum is just a big community, and (contextually) it has every right to kick people out for their opinions.
Ah, Reductio ad absurdum, haven't seen that one in a while. Using your logic I could say we should kick out all people who want gaming to be changed from the gaming community. After all a large number of them are only interested in making fun of us basement dwelling nerd virgins. After all you said it yourself that a big community has every right to kick people out for their opinions.
I don't do that. So I don't see how that holds.
I also fail to see how a site which is dedicated to helping rape victims would be a forum, or have a forum on it other then a simple QnA and lines of direct communication between victims and assistance. Forums are, by their very nature, places of discussion of ideas. It's why all (good) forums have an Off-Topic section, no matter how dedicated you are there's always going to talk unrelated to the issue at hand. The idea of a forum dedicated to rape survives is, in and of itself, an absurdity.
Why wouldn't such a thing exist? They have shared experiences, they feel the need to have someone, anyone to talk about this kind of stuff with. They may have a hard time talking to people in person about the issue. I know I for one have never talked to anyone about my experiences, but you can find several posts on this site about it. It's easier to talk about this stuff online. So yeah, I would totally expect such a forum to exist.
And why is that absurd when forums dedicated to Nazi's, tabletop rpg's, or furries exist? There is a similar number of people and a similar desire to discuss with others possessing some shared experience.
I can agree with the first, I have no patience for moral or intellectual cowardice, one must stand by their beliefs and one must believe in something. But they don't have to debate with you. They don't have to answer every question ever posed to them. They don't have to deal with shit. One should argue, but not with everyone. One should face questioning, but not all questioning. There is a limit to what a person should reasonably have to tolerate.
The problem with your premise is that is assumes that those making the argument ever respond at all to any criticism. As it stands, most (including nearly all of those in a prominent position) never have. People want us to treat people like Anita as academics, and even have the gull to call her one, yet she neither uses an academic format nor meets even the most liberal interpretation of what it takes to be one.
Oh why did I bring her up...
Ok, I really like an LPer, VoidBurger. She currently is constantly being questioned on Twitter and the like because of her mild feminist stances, and now spends half her twitter feed answering to people. She gets tired of it every now and then and complains about it, and is often complaining about all the GGers that show up out of the woodwork the moment she says anything about the movement. Sometimes this agravation adds up to her ignoring complaints and some "criticism." This is fair, considering she has also already shown she is quite happy to defend her ideas.
Also, just as something to show what is wrong with GG, she is the only SA LPer I see get this crap, despite the fact that many of her LP friends follow the same people and say the same stuff. They also don't happen to have a vagina. What a coincidence.
Ah, YouTube comments, the last bastion of true intellectual discussion. I have no doubt that if I had a YouTube I would shut down comments the first time I saw any shit pop up. It just isn't worth it. And I bet most people understand that. The only reason people started getting pissed about all these YouTube comments getting shut down in the first place is that it meant they didn't have a place where they could ***** and moan about bullshit anymore. Oh sure, I doubt that was the motivation for most, but that's what started it, and the rest just bought the piss poor arguments of the bitchers and moaners hook, line, and sinker. YouTube comments aren't worth the electricity necessary to generate them. I wish every channel locked their comments. The world would be a better place then.
Like all things 90% of YouTube comments are shit. That's not exclusive to YouTube comments, it's a rule which applies to all things. I've actually had some arguments in those comments that are on par with the intellectual debate I've had in my collage. They are rare, but they happen, and they usually happen in videos discussing an idea.
No, it is far more than 90% here. The use of that term is just a way to dismiss anyone's problems with a medium or whatever. YouTube's format is set up to be totally destructive to reasonable debate in the comments. It discourages lengthy debate, the upvoting system is shit in absolutely all cases, as it encourages circlejerkery, it is difficult to recognize who's talking to who in a long comment chain, etc.
And say what you will about the comment section, if it's because the person doesn't want to respond to it, they simply should ignore it. From their perspective closing it and leaving it open but without interaction leads to the same result, only with the latter actually letting people discus the issue at hand in the place most appropriate. With the way YouTube's comments work, it's easy to sift threw the garbage to the relevant comments. Plus there's the tendency to remove the like/dislike bar (something Google really needs to remove, no one should be able to shut it off). All that indicates is how many people felt strongly enough to voice approval or disapproval in the most basic means possible.
I've noticed a trend in terms of those who consistently shut off their comment sections and disable the like bar, they tend to usually either be channels dedicated to a radical religious view (typically creationism or a litrealist interpretation of a holy text) or a radical political one (such as FF). Channel's like TB's tend to be the exception, not the rule (and he also keeps the like bar active).
Matt Lees justified closing his by saying he couldn't engage with them and moderate them like he would prefer, an argument I find to be enough to dismiss that particular wretched hive. And, in most cases, I don't see how the like/dislike bar is supposed to be useful or not. If somebody is talking about something controversial, there will be more dislikes. If the video is bad, the ratio may dip a pixel or two. If it's clickbait, the bar will vary wildly (I'm talking about genuine, tits in the link, clickbait here). The last of those is the only one where the change is significant enough to notice and where you don't already know about the problem in advance, and is honestly the only place where it's useful.
