Was it fair how Jack Thompson was treated?

[Dragonbums]

I wish this was what was happening. I wish Anita Sarkeesian used her gigantic budget (of which only $8000 was needed for her video series) to fund a game which has depictions of women SHE endorses.

It's a shame then that her KS specifically said that she was only going to talk about tropes in videogames and nothing else. I mean, this dictating of money that people willingly gave her knowing what she was going to produce from people who contributed zero dollars to her KS campagin is amusing.

Yet on the other hand you have Ubisoft making fucking millions and when people say "With all this money you have, why didn't you include women in most recent release"- people are quick to defend them from the horrible censoring feminists who are trying to dictate what game devs can or can't do with their money.

Imagine how much more credibility she'd have if she had the writing credits to an actually good game with actually good female characters (assuming she'd be able to write decent female characters, but she'd at least avoid the stereotypes that bother her).

Look at the reaction to her being revealed to have any relation to Mirror's Edge 2. People are already writing the game off as feminist tripe because Anita Sarkeesian was said to of done a thing during game development.

I actually don't know what her motive was.

To talk about tropes of female characters in videogames?

I don't believe she was trying to censor games.

I don't think she ever once said that was her goal either.

I also don't think she actively cared enough to endorse games with good female characters in them (leaving that topic until her final video which will probably never get made). Personally I think she wanted a soapbox to stand on to complain about trivialities and exaggerated problems while donations paid her bills.

I mean, her video series is called Tropes Vs. Women in videogames. The literal point of her video is to talk about games that have overused tropes of women in videogames. With that basic premise I don't know why anyone thinks she is obligated to show good examples when the whole point of her video is to point out games that use it in a lazy manner. That's like watching a man on YT making a rant about Megaman being shit today and getting mad at him because he didn't acknowledge the fact that the first game was like a solid gold bar. At that's not even to mention the fact that in every single video in the end she says that just because a videogame has these elements doesn't mean you can't enjoy it, or it's bad.

When it comes to other "feminist" speakers and "critics" in games media at the moment...I don't think any of them are doing much to address the homogeneous nature of mainstream games,

Really? I mean if they weren't doing much of anything we wouldn't be having this SJW scarefest that's running rampant on all these gaming forums about how tumblerinas and "feminaaaazis" and "SJW's" are ruining gaming (just like how casuals, bro gamers, mobile gamers, etc were ruining gaming 9 months ago.)

and the ones that are don't get nearly as much publicity as the ones that just want to complain and shout misogyny.

We all pick and choose who we want to elevate to stardom. There were thousands of other feminists who are much better at doing what Anita did, but we all decided Anita was the one to put on an internet wide soapbox. It's not her fault she's popular. It's our fault.

Because why elevate people like Extra Credits to huge levels of popularity when we can cherry pick easy targets like Anita for pageviews and clicks? And get even more clicks and pageviews when it blows up in our face and we are faced with the reality of creating a beast that got bigger than we could ever hope to imagine for?

 

[JohnFei]

words words words

The idea that games can make you into a mass murderer or rapist, is JUST as retarded as the idea that entertainment can encourage a violence culture, or a rape culture.

FIFY

Just like the other thread, we're now at page 3 and there is still nothing to back up JT and AS's nebulous theorycrafting.

Until there is a shred of proof that confirms playing games will turn you into a sexist/misogynerd/murderer, the Thompson comparison will continue to come back, again and again. It ain't going away.

 

[direkiller]

Thompson didn't offer criticism of videogames, he simply blamed them for things. He didn't want to change them, or improve them, he simply wanted to remove them.

I don't think that the backlash against Thompson was as personal

He said he had received death threats from Howard Stern listeners.
Said something about there level of IQ and mentioned he had caller ID.
Nothing ever came of it, no police report was filed, and no arrest made.

Though to be honest, I would be surprised if he never revived a death threat, the guy also commented on Islam, Homosexuality, The liberal agenda, porn & rap music in not so kind ways.

That many pissed off people, someone had to send him a death threat at some point.

 

[Xan Krieger]

If you act like a piece of shit you get treated like a piece of shit. He spewed hatred and made a jerk out of himself so we treated him accordingly. If he had been willing to be more civil we wouldn't have been so harsh on him.

 

[Dizchu]

Spoiler: Warning: Anita Sarkeesian rambling

It's a shame then that her KS specifically said that she was only going to talk about tropes in videogames and nothing else. I mean, this dictating of money that people willingly gave her knowing what she was going to produce from people who contributed zero dollars to her KS campagin is amusing.

She "needed" $6000 (I accidentally said $8,000 in the last post oops). She got $159,000. Her video series has neither been completed nor made use of the extra money. So where did the money go? It indicates a lack of sincerity. If I were to make a video series on gender representation and I had that much money I would make damn well sure that it'd be put to good use because I care very strongly about gender topics in all kinds of media. That $159k has already been spent as Feminist Frequency are asking for even more donations. Where exactly DID that money go?

Yet on the other hand you have Ubisoft making fucking millions and when people say "With all this money you have, why didn't you include women in most recent release"- people are quick to defend them from the horrible censoring feminists who are trying to dictate what game devs can or can't do with their money.

Ubisoft don't ask for donations to fund their games if I recall correctly. Yeah I'm as upset as everyone else that the newest Assassins Creed game doesn't have female playable characters, but they're unfortunately driven by lowest-common-denominator marketing. Ubisoft's games need large budgets because of their huge development teams. Anita Sarkeesian's video series could have been done on a budget of literally $0 by a video games enthusiast in their spare time. I am honestly struggling to figure out where the $159k went.

Look at the reaction to her being revealed to have any relation to Mirror's Edge 2. People are already writing the game off as feminist tripe because Anita Sarkeesian was said to of done a thing during game development.

This was after she had a reputation. She also said that the first Mirror's Edge was hard for females to get into because of "difficult controls". How patronising is that?

To talk about tropes of female characters in videogames?

The question I'm asking is why talk about tropes? Don't get me wrong, I think gender tropes are important to discuss... but there's no discussion happening here.

If I made "Tropes vs Women" I'd present the tropes, give them context by referring to anthropology, evolution, culture etc., present examples that eschew the tropes for comparison and discuss how the trope can be used tastefully while criticising when it is used distastefully. See how much more interesting and productive that is?

I don't think she ever once said that was her goal either.

It's a common sentiment in the anti-Anita crowd that I have come to despise. I actually don't know what Anita hopes to achieve because she never focusses on the big picture or on any end-goal (much like Jack Thompson).

I mean, her video series is called Tropes Vs. Women in videogames. The literal point of her video is to talk about games that have overused tropes of women in videogames. With that basic premise I don't know why anyone thinks she is obligated to show good examples when the whole point of her video is to point out games that use it in a lazy manner.

I have written essays and a dissertation on game design. If I presented one side relentlessly I'd get a shitty grade. Making a good argument requires the consideration of more than one point of view. It doesn't weaken your own point of view, it means you understand the context of the discussion. I'd argue that you cannot have a good discussion about overused tropes without citing examples of said tropes being used well (if there are any such examples) or being deliberately avoided and how that ends up making a superior product.

Then there's the argument of laziness vs sexism. I think many of the tropes Anita complains about are a result of laziness rather than sexism (especially those involving Mario and Zelda, franchises that began when game storytelling was extremely basic).

That's like watching a man on YT making a rant about Megaman being shit today and getting mad at him because he didn't acknowledge the fact that the first game was like a solid gold bar. At that's not even to mention the fact that in every single video in the end she says that just because a videogame has these elements doesn't mean you can't enjoy it, or it's bad.

That just indicates to me that she doesn't have much confidence in her own arguments. I know why gender stereotypes are bad, they re-enforce certain patriarchal aspects of society. But Anita uses relentless sensationalism in her arguments, "objectification" is used so often and the overall tone is so negative that she feels the need to point out that not everyone who plays these games is a raging misogynist just to soften the blow. If her language was less confrontational and welcomed discussion there'd be much less of a backlash.

Really? I mean if they weren't doing much of anything we wouldn't be having this SJW scarefest that's running rampant on all these gaming forums about how tumblerinas and "feminaaaazis" and "SJW's" are ruining gaming (just like how casuals, bro gamers, mobile gamers, etc were ruining gaming 9 months ago.)

I meant they aren't doing anything productive. They're currently fanning the flames and being provocative rather than encouraging civilised discussion. I put "feminist" in quotation marks because they don't represent all feminists, especially not me.

I personally don't think SJWs and 17-year-old Tumblr users are "ruining gaming". Rather, they're ruining important discussions that deserve consideration. I'd love to have level-headed gender discussion happening but it gets drowned out by "OBJECTIFICATION!", "MISOGYNY", "FAKE GIRL GAMERS!", "WHINY MAN-BABIES!", "FEMINAZIS!", "PATRIARCHY!". It's the sad nature of the internet, Twitter in particular.

We all pick and choose who we want to elevate to stardom. There were thousands of other feminists who are much better at doing what Anita did, but we all decided Anita was the one to put on an internet wide soapbox. It's not her fault she's popular. It's our fault.

As much as I have argued against you you raise an excellent point here. Anita already had a less-than-favourable image before Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. She started her Kickstarter, there was some initial backlash, that backlash caused a huge stir with some feminists and game journalists which gave her more attention, that attention got even more backlash from anti-feminists, that backlash got its own backlash, and so on and so forth. Any legitimate points criticising her have been lost in a maelstrom of anti-feminist shit-slinging. It's very frustrating because I have issues with Anita that don't relate to her being a feminist.

Because why elevate people like Extra Credits to huge levels of popularity when we can cherry pick easy targets like Anita for pageviews and clicks? And get even more clicks and pageviews when it blows up in our face and we are faced with the reality of creating a beast that got bigger than we could ever hope to imagine for?

I love Extra Credits and I think you're spot-on with this point.

How much did she get? If we're talking a quarter of a million or so, that's really not a lot when it comes to making reasonable quality games. Quite aside from the fact that people who know an extremely limited amount about running a company in an industry are likely to throw away their money trying to get things done.

It depends what you mean by "reasonable quality games". Triple-A multi-platform release? Not a chance. A polished, stylised indie game? $150k could easily sustain a small dev team for enough time to develop a decent game. Good games have been made on budgets considerably less than that in the past.

If Anita used her funds to make a small game that parodied the tropes she has issues with in clever ways it would have gotten her point across much more effectively than her video series. It's like how Shrek made fun of the overused Disney-style fairytale theme at the time and the tropes associated with it. Since then there's been a large number of ironic Disney parodies and even an increase in self-awareness with Disney films like Tangled and Frozen.

But that's just my opinion. My main issue is that extra $150k not being put to good use. It's a lot of money.

If you act like a piece of shit you get treated like a piece of shit. He spewed hatred and made a jerk out of himself so we treated him accordingly. If he had been willing to be more civil we wouldn't have been so harsh on him.

He's not a "piece of shit" that deserved harassment and death threats. He's a reactionary luddite that exaggerates certain problems with western culture and attributes at least part of their cause to video games because they're an easy target.

Jack Thompson overlooks the USA's rampant gun problems and uses video games as a scapegoat or a red herring to deflect criticism away from America's gun culture. Or maybe he's just an idiot.

The real problem here is the NRA. The people that claim that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" while simultaneously blaming video games for school shootings.

What they fail to realise is that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" is the premise for nearly every first-person shooter.

 

[Entitled]

The idea that games can make you into a mass murderer or rapist, is JUST as retarded as the idea that entertainment can encourage a violence culture, or a rape culture.

This kind of shallow, counter-intuitive anti-culture equivalence, is ultimately the crux of the issue.

It's not about proof, or about "thories" being correct. There has already been plenty of proof collected through studies, that the specific games-are-brainwashing theries have been INCORRECT. Wrong. They are not an issue. The problem is with the interchargible treatment of such theories, with our most self-evident observations on how culture fundamentally works.

With a set of people, whose logic is running along the lines that if GTA is not making you murder hookers, then obviously Uncle Tom's cabin couldn't have encouraged the abolitionist movement, and Atlas Shrugged couldn't possibly influence libertarianism, and Call of Duty can't encourage reckless gun culture.

After all, the concept of fiction influencing real life behavior is just "retarded" "theorycrafting" that lacks sufficient evidence.

The very idea that art might induce feelings and thoughts in the public, then these feelings and thoughts might influence public behavior, is treated as some newfangled "narrative" that was invented by His Infernal Majesty, Jack Thompson, and merely appropriated by anyone else who has ever since said anything among these lines.

 

[Lightknight]

I wish this was what was happening. I wish Anita Sarkeesian used her gigantic budget (of which only $8000 was needed for her video series) to fund a game which has depictions of women SHE endorses.

It's a shame then that her KS specifically said that she was only going to talk about tropes in videogames and nothing else. I mean, this dictating of money that people willingly gave her knowing what she was going to produce from people who contributed zero dollars to her KS campagin is amusing.

Yet on the other hand you have Ubisoft making fucking millions and when people say "With all this money you have, why didn't you include women in most recent release"- people are quick to defend them from the horrible censoring feminists who are trying to dictate what game devs can or can't do with their money.

It is sort of a chicken/egg scenario but if more women bought Assassin's Creed games then maybe Ubisoft would cater to them.

The Egg being that maybe if Ubisoft catered to them, maybe they'd buy more games. But from looking at female gamer statistics, there's already still a fairly big disparity in gender purchases according to game genre with FPS titles and several other AAA titles being really low on their (females) list on average. As I've said to you before, my wife is on the minority side of things, she loves COD and I was glad when she got female skins in Ghosts. But being or knowing exceptions to the rule does not a trend make.

So if they (assassin's creed devs) just wanted to make one character and if their demographic is overwhelmingly male, then I'm not really seeing a problem. If someone did a legitimate study and found out that 25% of the assassin's creed consumers are female then we'd have a problem.

Now, in 2010 we saw that 80% of females who owned a console owned a Wii as their primary. I'd love to see percentages and numbers for this generation since the WiiU is still just treading water beside the XBO. Did women opt not to buy in large numbers this time or are they still there? I don't know. But all statistical data still points to males being the vast majority of the main core gamer (gamers who play major titles for over 5 hours a week according to that NDP study the Escapist posted) and females being the vast majority of the casual demographic (mobile and non-core gameplay).

While there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a casual gamer and that absolutely doesn't mean there aren't female core gamers like my wife (wish the NDP would have released the actual numbers instead of just telling us which group had which gender in higher numbers), we do know that males still dominate the main core segment and that this segment spends more than twice what the other segments do. So if you're a AAA developer looking at your target consumer market, you're seeing a whole lot of sausage. I do not blame companies investing millions of dollars in a project for playing it safe. In fact, them not listening to you would be them catering to their consumers, which is good and wise for a company to do.

Now, while it's not "too hard" to add female characters, it does cost money. Best case scenario is that someone did a cost/benefit analysis of female voice-acting and motion capture and modeling but decided that the possible gains did not justify the costs. Or, they simply didn't think that a female protagonist jived with the story they were trying to tell which is perfectly acceptable. Demanding they do otherwise would be like demanding movies produce two movies with a male or female lead in either.

I think an assassin's creed in which both of Desmond's great great great grand mother and father are assassins. In the single player you get to choose between the two and that determines the story in some ways. That'd be nice.

From what I've gathered of Jack Thompson (since I starting forum posting in videogame stuff near the end of this fiasco.) The man had actual legal manpower and enough people believing him in the right places to actually restrict access to videogames. Of course what better way for us gamers to prove to him that we aren't violent, fuckbags than to send the man death threats to his person and family eh? I'm pretty sure slamming his dumb ass through a Youtube video would of sufficed.

Anita on the other hand was a handplucked everyday feminist Youtuber and taken to super star popularity where people can then act like she is the next Jack Thompson like she had any real leg power in the video game industry anyway.


Either way, both of the shit they received are undeniably uncalled for. And honestly serves to prove their point.

Legal authority and a social influence can often achieve the same results. That she is so popular and has lied so overtly to achieve her point is troublesome.

 

[JohnFei]

wordy words words

I hope you're just trolling at this point, because otherwise I'm genuinely concerned about the mental gymnastics involved in writing that gibberish. No proof is no proof. Sorry.

If case anyone needs more proof that Tropes vs Women's argument is basically Thompson re-hash. Here are some choice comments from the producer, co-writer of the series, the man behind AS, Jonathan McIntosh:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzWYKzUCEAAUeVi.jpg

Literally Thompson 2.0

 

[DataSnake]

If it doesn't make people sexist, then who the hell cares? What point is there to complain about it or lift a finger against it? If it doesn't cause harm, then it's just a typical form of media and people like Anita have no right calling it harmful to society.

Yes, it is just a typical form of media. That's why it's getting the same scrutiny as every other form of media. Or didn't you know that there are feminist critiques of movies, TV shows and books too?

Ads are generally suited to match products with consumers who need/want those products. They don't actually change your desires. They may make you aware of a need you didn't know you had, but they don't alter you (which is what you're saying, I think).

Then why do we see ads for McDonald's or Call of Duty games? Everyone's heard of them already, but they keep spending money on ads for some reason.

Ok... here's where you're being inconsistent. You say it doesn't make you sexist, then you say that it'll make you "slightly more sexist" which is the actual conclusion from the statement you just made.

Maybe we're talking past each other here. Let me try again. Better yet, let me quote someone else:

With a set of people, whose logic is running along the lines that if GTA is not making you murder hookers, then obviously Uncle Tom's cabin couldn't have encouraged the abolitionist movement, and Atlas Shrugged couldn't possibly influence libertarianism, and Call of Duty can't encourage reckless gun culture.

After all, the concept of fiction influencing real life behavior is just "retarded" "theorycrafting" that lacks sufficient evidence.

The very idea that art might induce feelings and thoughts in the public, then these feelings and thoughts might influence public behavior, is treated as some newfangled "narrative" that was invented by His Infernal Majesty, Jack Thompson, and merely appropriated by anyone else who has ever since said anything among these lines.

Pretty much that.

If the claim is that the subject matter makes you more ... "naziish", then it's on the claimant to establish that watching the video will actually make you such.

Alright, let's try something a bit different. Suppose Birth of a Nation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation] came out this year. We can both agree that seeing it won't magically turn people into Klansmen. It's also generally considered an "objectively" well-made movie.[footnote]It also paints the Klan as being about fighting corruption rather than harassing minorities, so make of that what you will.[/footnote] Should reviews just ignore the racism and focus on the cinematography? Would pointing out that audiences might find the way it portrays black people as dangerous, power-hungry lunatics distasteful be acceptable, or would it be an example of "bias" and proof that the reviewer was an "SJW"?

Anita's claim is that sexism in video games perpetuates sexism.

Well it's true. Let's look at some logic:
1. Sexist messages in media perpetuate sexist attitudes in our culture.
2. Videogames are a form of media.
From these, it follows logically that:
3. Sexist messages in videogames perpetuate sexist attitudes in our culture.
That's all that's being said. It's not "Duke Nukem will make you a date rapist" or anything like that. It's just that videogames, just like any other form of media, can influence cultural attitudes. Incidentally, that's another key difference between Thompson and Sarkeesian. Thompson claimed that games were unusual in their ability to influence people, Sarkeesian claims they're not.

That is, it continues it which does imply instilling sexist attitudes and ideals on the consumer base. That she isn't going to outright say it does not negate it from being the obvious conclusion.

So even though she's never said that, you're going to assume that it's her thesis and then act like her failure to support a claim that she never made proves you right?

What's more is, how silly is it to say that a game like Mario is sexist? Oh no, a random princess got kidnapped. Surely that's teaching children that women belong in the kitchen or bedroom or in the hallway between... In order for this to perpetuate anything, you have to first establish that the Princess was only able to be captured because she's female and that a female getting captured because they're female is actually sexist. Being that women are naturally weaker than men by FAR on average, men overpowering women is entirely viable and common enough to be a problem (unless people believe that rape isn't a problem, in which case screw whoever thinks it's not a problem).

Yes, realism is definitely a major concern in a story about the ruler of a kingdom of sentient fungi being kidnapped by a fire-breathing spiky turtle and rescued, not by the police or the military, but by a mustachioed plumber.

Look, whoever got "women are weak" from the Super Mario Bros are idiots. Played that game a million times in my youth and never once so much as considered Princess Peach as a symbol of all women everywhere so much as specifically the princess. An individual that bowser captured. Games, if nothing else, have taught me that people who have been kidnapped need to be rescued. Not that people are captured because they are X or Y or both.

The only "sexism" I see in games is sexual objectification. And let me tell you, objectification requires the person to actually be a person and not a bunch of ones and zeroes. You can't actually objectify non-living beings. Sure, make explicit video game porn where the character on screen wants nothing more than to please you, it's still not objectifying any real person and as long as the person enjoying it is not Schizophrenic then they can distinguish between reality and fiction and something they see in fiction won't translate into how they view real people.

I mean, honestly, if we couldn't tell the difference between fact and fiction then we'd be in real trouble. Do you actually know anyone in the world who assumes that because of the Duke Nukem Girls that every girl in real life dresses skimpy and wants to give them a bj?

Of course not. That would be stupid. Where you're going wrong is in assuming that just because sexist tropes in games don't cause major shifts in attitude they have no effect at all. Here's a brief instructional video on small things and whether they matter:

Spoiler

[youtube]VLbWnJGlyMU[/youtube]
EDIT: it looks like that video won't embed properly. On the off chance that it's not just my browser shitting the bed again, here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbWnJGlyMU]'s a link to the video.

We have people crying wolf just like Thompson did and we're just playing into it because it's a cause we believe in. Yes, we believe in equality. That's great. But the problem is that they're saying a problem exists when the evidence isn't there. I believe that both racy games and games that cater specifically to women or include women in their process all have a place. The goal isn't to stop sexy depictions of women in games and all other media. Those should continue because humans like that sort of stuff, but we should have a wider range of options out there for women too. But to start the argument with something guys like as being necessarily evil without anything to back that up is simply offensive.

Well it's a good thing nobody's actually making that argument then, isn't it?

 

[WhiteNachos]

When I think back years ago during the whole chaos that ensued because of the criticism by Jack Thompson I have to wonder if the Game media would condemn the community for threats and harassment aimed at Thompson.

They did. IIRC They didn't shine a spotlight on those threats though because they were worried about how gamers were perceived, and they didn't give attention to every random person talking shit in a forum thread (unlike nowadays where they don't really seem to care about how gamers are perceived and will take the opportunity to get on their high horse and bash gamers whenever a few trolls misbehave), but when those threats briefly got the spotlight, they condemend them.,

Why did they not at least condemn gamers for their behavior rather then vilifying him along with the gamer community. Would it have made any difference in the past if the criticism had come from a woman?

Honestly no. Jack Thompson campaigned for government censorship and tried to tie games to any recent headline making school shooting story. Hillary Clinton got tons of flack for her anti game stance too. She didn't try to tie it to every modern school shooting but she did get flak. Hell if she was still campaigning against she'd probably still get lots of flak (I don't recall her ever picking up the cause since she became secretary of state).

How do you think Thompson would be treated by Games media today if he had appeared now and not in the past.

As a relic. Thompson is American and in the US, the supreme court ruled video games to be free speech and they struck down a law banning the sale of violent video games to minors as unconstitutional. Sure some of it may have been the wording of that specific law but the issue seems to have died ever since. No one's really worried about government censorship coming from the anti violence front. And if they were to try to get another law passed they couldn't do it in secret so we'd have time to wage a counter attack (for lack of a better word). So if Thompson were to show up today he'd just be another person fighting a lost cause.

Even though he may have been wrong did he deserve all the harassment and death threats he received.

Death threats, no. Harassment? Well if you read the disbarment order for him (which is public record), he harassed people he worked with. One person claimed their fax machine broke because of all the faxes they got from him. I wonder if that is a reaction from the way he was treated though.

Was his view point about games really all the different from suggestion that video games can impact woman and how they are treated which may cause more sexism?

Sexism is way more vaguely defined than violence. If a game makes me believe that girls like cats that is sexism but no one would say that's in the same ballark as 'they made me attack someone' or even 'they made me think men are superior to women'. I've seen certain critics imply that they cause domestic violence or violence against women and those claims are very similar to Jack's, but they also make less dramatic claims so it's not exactly equivalent

While I understand it not taken quite as far as Thompson I think its still in the same ballpark as what we are hearing today from Pop culture critics. To be fair I don't think they are that close together in their ideology but its something to consider.

I'm wondering why some of the modern critics don't get called out by the press when they make claims about games causing violence or whatever. My guess is they don't want to be seen as being on the side of the trolls.

 

[WhiteNachos]

Why did they not at least condemn gamers for their behavior rather then vilifying him along with the gamer community. Would it have made any difference in the past if the criticism had come from a woman?

Well, I remember the gaming community at large's reaction to Thompson being a hell of a lot more classy than during the whole recent cataclysm (people sent him flowers, flowers!).

I can't help but think that's some mighty selective remembering you're doing there. Thompson also (claims to have) received death threats and the gaming media was all too happy to stand by and let it happen.

Let it happen?

How exactly could they have stopped them?

Dude was getting threats by email. How exactly would the press be able to stop it from happening? Condemning it doesn't guarantee it'll stop.

 

[WhiteNachos]

Oh look it's that thread again. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.856153-Question-If-Anita-Sarkeesian-is-Right-why-is-Jack-Thompson-Wrong]

I'm so tired of this Anita Sarkeesian / Jack Thompson comparison. You may not name her, but your question is transparent. Thompson actively wanted games to be banned and called game developers accessories to murder. Sarkeesian is saying "Hey, maybe stop objectifying women so much in your games". Disagree with her all you want, but comparing her to this madman only serves to make you look bad.

She said a lot more than that. She called tons of different things sexist/misogynist and she implied that games can lead to domestic violence saying it was "irresponsible" for games to have so much violence against women when there's so much domestic violence in the world or something like that. Even if you think that wasn't her intention, acting like "don't objectify fictional women" was her most controversial stance is just dishonest.

 

[Dragonbums]

Death threats and harrasment are only a problem when its done to women. When its done to men, it doesn't count. When its done to woman, it causes anything a woman has ever done to be disregarded.

I don't get how people can have woman as weak victims AND as strong as men. Pick one or the other, preferbly the second/.

Why is it a free ticket to celebrity and a get ouf of jail card when its done to woman, but means abosltly nothing when it happens to men? If we want gender equality, shouldn't people react the same way regardless of who gets the death threats?

You have a bunch of people in this very thread talking about how the harassment and death threats against Jack Thompson were not only disgusting and uncalled for, but only served to prove his point.

 

[WhiteNachos]

You grabbed a random quote of him where he said that he űwas OK with a certain thing, and positioned it as a demonstration that he was OK with harrasment.

Yes, because I inferred that to be his position on the matter based on that quote in addition to other statements I've seen him make on Twitter. In his mind, Thompson and those who think like him are/were a ''real enemy'' who had to be fought back by any means necessary. That's the impression he gives off, at least.

Have you considered, that maybe the same people who most excessively screamed about how gaming community can't effect behavior at all, are the same people who are screaming the same thing now about sexism? Maybe the people who sent Jack Thompson death threats are the same ones who are sending death threats to Sarkeesian now?

Even if that's true, there's still a world of difference between the way the gaming-press reacted to Thompson being threatened and the way they reacted to Sarkeesian being threatened. Or rather, there actually was a reaction and much-deserved condemnation when there was news of the latter receiving death threats for her work. No such courtesy was extended to Thompson.

Do they need to react every time some shmuck sends empty threats while trolling or venting on the internet?

 

[Dragonbums]

She "needed" $6000 (I accidentally said $8,000 in the last post oops). She got $159,000.

And who's fault was that? Certainly not hers. People donated regardless, and the only people who seem to complain about it are people who did not put money into her KS. So why are people still worked up over it?

Her video series has neither been completed nor made use of the extra money.

And? There are thousands of KS that are funded and are not completed on time nor making use of extra money. As far as everyone who funded her are concerned she is keeping her end of the bargain by making videos.

Any grievances you have about how she spends her money is just complaining. You didn't fund her KS so why should you give a shit?

So where did the money go? It indicates a lack of sincerity.

Lack of sincerity in what? That you take huge umbrage against someone you don't like getting way more money than they asked or needed and doing whatever with it?

If I were to make a video series on gender representation and I had that much money I would make damn well sure that it'd be put to good use because I care very strongly about gender topics in all kinds of media. That $159k has already been spent as Feminist Frequency are asking for even more donations.

Well I guess you should get started and make that video series then? Instead of getting mad at some other person for making videos and getting more money than you think she's worth.

As always the funny thing is is that Anita would of continued to be a small time nobody had we as a community not acted like assbabies and treated criticism we don't agree with with actual civility as opposed to bringing out the pitchforks yet again.

Where exactly DID that money go?

I don't know? Buying games, paying staff, purchasing programs, hiring people, maintaining sites and maintenance. It's not like you can visually tell if she spent all of the money on fucking Gucci brand clothing. I mean, you have Pewdiepie do even less than Anita and the man makes fucking millions. Aside from the charity donation here and there you don't have people swarming on his page asking where the other 2 million dollars he makes is going to. So why is she any different?

Ubisoft don't ask for donations to fund their games if I recall correctly. Yeah I'm as upset as everyone else that the newest Assassins Creed game doesn't have female playable characters, but they're unfortunately driven by lowest-common-denominator marketing. Ubisoft's games need large budgets because of their huge development teams. Anita Sarkeesian's video series could have been done on a budget of literally $0 by a video games enthusiast in their spare time. I am honestly struggling to figure out where the $159k went.

It's irrelevant whether or not Ubisoft funded their game through donations, crowdfunding, or corporate sponserships. the point I'm getting at is that people who had no part in the funding of a game, blog, product, etc. are quick to dictate or demand what he/she/they should or shouldn't do with that kind of money and yet on that same note go on and defend people like Ubisoft for making lazy shit excuses.

After all it's us buying their products that give them the funds to develop their next line of games. So surely if we can dictate to Anita what willing donations should go to regardless of if we had any part of it, consumers who have paid for and/or contributed to Ubisoft's success of making games should have a say what they can or cannot put in the game right?

This was after she had a reputation.

So what difference would it make then? Either way the effect will be bad. It's not like her reputation was better beforehand. As someone else has said in threads relating to her, she has made these kinds of videos for years. But the moment she touched precious vidya suddenly people acted like she's the next Jack Thompson of videogames.

She also said that the first Mirror's Edge was hard for females to get into because of "difficult controls". How patronising is that?

I mean, that depends. You have people in this forum that honestly think that one of the reasons why women don't play videogames is because they are biologically not wired to not be privy to anything other than Cooking Mama and Candy Crush. I've heard worse.

And to be fair, lots of people complained about the controls in Mirrors Edge.

The question I'm asking is why talk about tropes?

Why not?

Don't get me wrong, I think gender tropes are important to discuss... but there's no discussion happening here.

No discussion? There is discussion about this stuff outside of Anita about this all the time. Hell go on the first page of the Gaming Discussion forum and there is a thread there discussing the sexualisation of some characters in some new videogame that came out. So what do you mean there is no discussion happening. It's not the topic's fault if people are into kneejerk rage fests than talking about the subject at hand.

If I made "Tropes vs Women" I'd present the tropes, give them context by referring to anthropology, evolution, culture etc.,

In her very first video she literally spent about 5-10 minutes doing just that, and everyone went tl;dw she implied Miyamoto was sexist or something time to rage online.


present examples that eschew the tropes for comparison and discuss how the trope can be used tastefully while criticising when it is used distastefully.

See how much more interesting and productive that is?

Why is the latter not productive? That seems to me you want to make videos that celebrate the positivity of tropes. If that's the case than go do that. But guess what, she wants to talk about the negative connotations. If that's not your cup of tea than ignore her videos. Sorry that some people aren't willing to sugar coat everything with positives. That's how criticism works. Especially in the art and entertainment field. You have critics that give the good and the bad, and you have people who say it's outright shit and leave.

Once again this is called Tropes VS Women in videogames. i.e we talk about tropes that women are often portrayed in videogames and how it reinforces streotypes of women in the big picture. That' doesn't require the speaker to give game dev #5 a sugar bone because they used overused damsel in distress trope in a good way.

It's a common sentiment in the anti-Anita crowd that I have come to despise. I actually don't know what Anita hopes to achieve because she never focusses on the big picture or on any end-goal (much like Jack Thompson).

I mean...she just makes videos about Tropes relating to women in gaming. It's like asking Yahtzee or Jimsterling, or the staff at Extra Credits what their "end goal" or bigger picture is. They just talk about shit.

I have written essays and a dissertation on game design. If I presented one side relentlessly I'd get a shitty grade. Making a good argument requires the consideration of more than one point of view. It doesn't weaken your own point of view, it means you understand the context of the discussion. I'd argue that you cannot have a good discussion about overused tropes without citing examples of said tropes being used well (if there are any such examples) or being deliberately avoided and how that ends up making a superior product.

That's great. I mean, why don't people put more effort into making people who do do these thing as opposed to making people like Anita internet superstars?

This is what annoys the hell out of me about her entire situation in general. Nobody in the gaming community wants to hold up people with reasonable points of views and unbiased analysis nearly as much as they want to hold up feminist blog #34987 to super nova levels because this blog of 4 fucking followers said that LoTR should have PoC elves. Like...?

Then there's the argument of laziness vs sexism. I think many of the tropes Anita complains about are a result of laziness rather than sexism (especially those involving Mario and Zelda, franchises that began when game storytelling was extremely basic).

And laziness isn't an excuse in a multibillion dollar industry such as videogames. Unlike Mario, Zelda, and other similar franchises that had very real limitations that prevented them from going beyond that, today's games don't have that excuse.

But I found that anything in this industry can be excused as long as you play the demographics and business "moneyz" card. Unless it's someone you hate like EA and Ubisoft, or Activision.

That just indicates to me that she doesn't have much confidence in her own arguments.

Are you sure? I mean even without Anita in the picture I can find plenty of examples of what she's arguing about. It's not like it's an unproven thing either. You even admitted earlier anyway that she likes to point out a lot of the bad. Which means she has more than enough substantial evidence to back up her claims. Having a couple of good examples won't hinder her argument that it's an overused trope of women in videogames.

But Anita uses relentless sensationalism in her arguments,

The only people making Anita a sensation are the ones who take her videos on a personal level. Her videos are boring for the most part and are pretty baseline.

"objectification" is used so often and the overall tone is so negative that she feels the need to point out that not everyone who plays these games is a raging misogynist just to soften the blow. If her language was less confrontational and welcomed discussion there'd be much less of a backlash.

Really? I mean honestly now there are quite a lot of women in videogames, side characters or main that are certainly designed to titillate in mind. It's overused as a word because it's kind of a big fucking thing in videogames anyway.

She never claimed all gamers were misogynists in videogames. All she ever said was that just because a videogames has these elements doesn't mean they aren't good or you can't enjoy them on a personal level. That's like the ending line of every criticism video ever.

As for the backlash, who fucking gives a shit? She blocked comments on Youtube. Literally the last place on Earth for rational discussion of any kind to take place. Nothing has stopped discussion happening, here, on Kotaku, on IGN, or anywhere fucking else her videos are posted. Then again it's not like we as a community did a good job holding rational discussion without going into insult territory by calling her every variation of whore, scam artist, fashion less tool, on top of a nice heaping pile of harassments and threats to her person.

I meant they aren't doing anything productive. They're currently fanning the flames and being provocative rather than encouraging civilised discussion.

If all it takes to be "provacative" is to make thread posts saying "I wish GTA had more female protagonists in their next game." to get everyone into roid rage than I think the gaming community has a lot bigger issues they need to deal with than some random tumblrite making threads about PoC dwarves or some shit.

And you also act like the other side is any more "productive" anyway. Last thread I saw from the anti-SJW side was "When will feminist step off of our hobby" implying that feminists and SJW's are also not people who put money into the videogames industry and would like to see it be more diverse.

I personally don't think SJWs and 17-year-old Tumblr users are "ruining gaming". Rather, they're ruining important discussions that deserve consideration.

Yet your only accusing tumblr users and SJW's? I mean, most of the inane ranting and raving literally stays on tumblr and twitter in the deepest parts of those sites. Those kinds of posts only rise to the light of day specifically because people like to screenshot this shit, and act like it's the forefront of tumblr. You wanna know what most of tumblr is comprised of videogame wise? gifsets, SSB4 meme, and fucking shipping blogs.

It's very frustrating because I have issues with Anita that don't relate to her being a feminist.

I am wholly neutral to Anita. The only reason I come off as "pro" is because I can't wrap my head around why people continously blow up her videos to such insane heights. They are nothing special, and there are so many other people who talk about this that are better at it than her. I can't even get mad at her. I don't' see the point. Unlike Thompson where he couldn't be ignored because he had very real legal, censoring power, Anita is someone who you can ignore and she goes into obscurity. Yet we keep bringing her back to the forefront again and again and again.

I love Extra Credits and I think you're spot-on with this point.

They need to come back to the Escapist or something.

 

[Uriel_Hayabusa]

Thompson also (claims to have) received death threats and the gaming media was all too happy to stand by and let it happen.

Let it happen?

How exactly could they have stopped them?

Dude was getting threats by email. How exactly would the press be able to stop it from happening? Condemning it doesn't guarantee it'll stop.

The gaming media could - and should - have run some articles about it. They could've sent the message that sending death threats to a guy who claims that games make people violent only makes the gaming community look bad.

And that's my issue with Bob, the refusal to admit that Thompson was also subject to threats and harassment. The refusal to acknowledge that some of his ''comrades'' treated Thompson in much the same manner as the worst of Sarkeesian's detractors do to her.

Do they need to react every time some shmuck sends empty threats while trolling or venting on the internet?

Why not? Jim Sterling certainly took a position like that in his Jimquisition-video The Wacky Harassment Blame Parade, and Bob has also taken a similar position in plenty of his GameOverthinker videos (see Building A Better Gamer for a good example).

 

[Dizchu]

I am wholly neutral to Anita. The only reason I come off as "pro" is because I can't wrap my head around why people continously blow up her videos to such insane heights. They are nothing special, and there are so many other people who talk about this that are better at it than her. I can't even get mad at her. I don't' see the point. Unlike Thompson where he couldn't be ignored because he had very real legal, censoring power, Anita is someone who you can ignore and she goes into obscurity. Yet we keep bringing her back to the forefront again and again and again.

I don't actively seek out Anita's stuff, I mostly share your opinion when it comes to her. Her videos are dull and in terms of feminist theory she doesn't present any interesting angles. My main problem with her is the excess Kickstarter money rather than her approach to feminism (though that irks me too). It's a problem I have with many Kickstarter projects, huge sinkholes of money and promises that aren't fulfilled. I know I repeated the £150k point over and over again but I have talked to a few backers that felt regret for their donations. They're probably a small minority but they're there.

I'm probably not helping by talking so much about her but I figured if most of the "discussion" was between paranoid idiots that think feminists are coming to take their stupid power fantasy games away the least I could do is offer a somewhat sober point of view.

 

[Silvanus]

I hope the Red Cross saying they won't push to prosecute gamers as war criminals counts [http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/8/4815090/gamers-committing-war-crimes-should-suffer-virtual-consequences-says]

So yes I do have a source on it which says just how unfortunately high up this thing went.

That doesn't support what you said before. Nobody has pushed EU courts to have gamers or game-owners prosecuted for war crimes; nobody even suggested it.