Video gaming culture part III

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Found this from BBC:

http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-18280000

From the article:

The world of video gaming has a problem with sexual harassment. The number of women gamers is growing fast - in the US they now make up 42% of the total - but it remains a macho environment, where women are often exposed to abusive language.

(The language in this report reflects that reality.)

"Get back in the kitchen and take your goddamn hands off a video game controller."

The male voices are aggressive, even angry. Their put-downs are laced with strong swearing and sexual insults.

"Stupid bitch," says one. "Fat whore," adds another.

"I hope your boyfriend beats you. Nah, you can't get a boyfriend."

The tirade of abuse ends and Jenny Haniver laughs.

"Get back in the kitchen?" she says. "I'm not in the kitchen because I'm here kicking your ass on video games, that's what I'm good at

We're sitting in her living room in Wisconsin, listening to audio recordings she makes when she goes online to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. It's a combat-based video game, where players can talk to each other via headsets.

The recordings end up on Haniver's website, Not in the Kitchen Any More. She plays in the evening after college and says most nights she'll have to deal with harassment of some kind. Some of it just puerile, but some is graphic and threatening.

"This enemy player backed out of the middle of the match and sent me a voice message," Haniver says, remembering her worst experience. He said he hoped she would be raped and she and her family killed.

Amazingly, this is not uncommon.

So, yes, harrassment is a serious issue in gaming. In this "Social Justice Warrior's" opinion.

Continue discussion.

[Suttree]

Vice magazine weighs in on Sarkeesian:

Californian blogger Anita Sarkeesian is one of the most famous cultural critics on the internet. Her Kickstarter to make a video series about “tropes vs. women in video games” was a huge success back in 2012 and raised much more than the $6,000 she had originally asked for. Her videos are some of the most thorough and well-researched examinations about gaming we’ve ever seen. It’s feminist criticism at its best: smart, witty, and intelligible to anyone who has spent time on YouTube.

Her work has also triggered one of the most violent abuse campaigns of recent internet history. Since her campaign took off, Sarkeesian has been blasted with misogynist bullshit: rape and death threats, Wikipedia vandalism, and even a game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. (It’s all detailed here.) Last week, Sarkeesian had to leave her home and notify police after someone sent her and her family very credible threats.

Sarkeesian isn’t the only feminist critic on the internet experiencing this. Other commentators are reporting violent reactions, and even male allies on the sidelines are getting sprayed with the hate shower. But Sarkeesian is the most prominent case, and she’s not stopping anytime soon. She is still posting her thoughtful videos, just as she has planned all along.

[Spring Bass]

Here's some ugly news - someone made a bomb threat to the Game Developers Choice Awards back in March unless they rescinded an award they were going to give to Sarkeesian. Thankfully they didn't comply and had the police come in and search for stuff.

An anonymous e-mailer threatened to blow up a bomb at the Game Developers Choice Awards this past March unless the hosts rescinded an award recognizing feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, the organizers of the event have confirmed to Kotaku.

"We can confirm that approximately 25 of GDC's organizers received an anonymous email early in the morning of Wednesday, March 19th, 2014 during GDC 2014," the organizers said in a statement.

"The email stated the following: 'A bomb will be detonated at the Game Developer's Choice award ceremony tonight unless Anita Sarkeesian's Ambassador Award is revoked. We estimate the bomb will kill at least a dozen people and injure dozens more. It would be in your best interest to accept our simple request. This is not a joke. You have been warned.'"

[Darian Frey]

I await with zeal the arrival of certain plonkers who insist that, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, this is all a myth.

[TerraPrime]

Actually, the article that Ini linked to has in it a really good link:

https://medium.com/@upstreamism/to-fair-minded-proponents-of-gamergate-7f3ce77301bb

Lots of great points on the gaming journalism angle and solid arguments on why the presence of social commentary amongst gaming press is a GOOD thing. We've seen our own folks here making similar arguments along that line too. Here's the end of that article:

It is, at any rate, imperative that you (the author means the gamers who see #Gamergate as a movement to improve gaming reporting) recognize not only that others are using #GamerGate to do exactly the things you claim to revile, but also that they’ve been more effective at achieving their goals than you’ve been at achieving yours. That, in no small part, is why you’re all being lumped together. You may think that you represent #GamerGate more truly than the harassers, but the public can’t help but see successful attacks as a kind of ownership. That may be unfair, but you’d be foolish to ignore it. At this point, the harassers have done so much damage that your best recourse may be to simply abandon the #GamerGate umbrella altogether, in favor of a rallying call that’s harder to co-opt. Every time they successfully run someone out of their home or damage the reputation of a potential ally, they take a stronger hold on the names under which you’ve rallied, and you lose a little bit more.

You lose because it gets harder to espouse your cause when people associate it with harassment and misogyny. You lose because the number of people actively working to make the press more reliable and gaming more inclusive dwindles a little more. You lose because more people feel excluded from gaming. You lose, most of all, because hate takes a greater share of the world.

[Inigima]

Mark Hill with another piece on this subject in Cracked. Zoë Quinn didn't write this one, so maybe people will pretend to read this one.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-ways-gamers-still-suck-at-dealing-with-women/

[Seli]

It looks like things got so bad that even 4chan has closed down all (?) gamergate threads in what I believe it is its video subboard (/v/).

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

It looks like things got so bad that even 4chan has closed down all (?) gamergate threads in what I believe it is its video subboard (/v/).

The #QuinnSpiracy deepens! Proof positive that Zoe Quinn has utilized her scary lady parts to seduce 4Chan moderators to convince them to engage in mass censorship to keep this affront to Serious Gaming Journalism quiet!

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4chan has moderators?

[Lord Flashheart]

4chan has moderators?

Right?

Careful though this is dangerously close to breaking forum rules. (ones I was totally unaware of until the last version of this thread) Move along peoples.

[Galactus]

I do wonder at what point some of these shitbags are going to cross the line and get officially declared a terrorist organization.

[Mentat]

So, yes, harrassment is a serious issue in gaming. In this "Social Justice Warrior's" opinion.

Continue discussion.

Though harassment is a serious issue, and this particular instance of it occurred while all the parties involved were playing a game, I think the problem is that certain part of gaming (a pretty specific one, actually) occurs within an unmoderated environment, where players have an illusion of anonymity and a perceived lack of consequence for anything they might do or say. I'd purport any other activity that shared these characteristics would eventually see harassment happening (e.g. a forum such as this if no one moderated it and anyone could say whatever they wanted with no consequence). I'd like to think adolescence also has part of the blame.

[TrueMetis]

I do wonder at what point some of these shitbags are going to cross the line and get officially declared a terrorist organization.

Think we may want to do something a bit more effective than that.

[Kalbear]

Think we may want to do something a bit more effective than that.

well, we could claim that gamers have found some oil...

[Seli]

4chan has moderators?

Worse, it has an owner, one who apparently had to step in.

[Shryke]

Think we may want to do something a bit more effective than that.

Declare them muslim and then declare them a terrorist organization?

[The Anti-Targ]

Vice magazine weighs in on Sarkeesian:

Her videos are some of the most thorough and well-researched examinations about gaming we’ve ever seen. It’s feminist criticism at its best: smart, witty, and intelligible to anyone who has spent time on YouTube.

I have to take issue with that. If it is in fact true it means there has been no decent research about gaming, because for all I agree with her overall views about sexism and misogyny needing to be gone from all forms of entertainment in general and video games in particular, a lot of the specifics in the videos are misplaced or misdirected. So I don't think it was all that well researched. IMO there were several examples she used in her videos that were not valid, if you know the game well. And there were several points of her argument that were misdirected and her arguments would have been much stronger and carried more weight if she had taken a different, but no less critical or insightful, tack. Whether you agree with my view or not, I've covered some of these points in previous threads, and I'm feeling too lazy to cite the specifics again here.

At some level I think Anita Sarkeesian may be aiming to get sex, sexiness, sexuality, nudity and violence removed from video games (happy to be corrected on this). But really, if we accept these things can and should be part of a mature (as in grown up, not as in X-rated) popular culture, and can be used in non-sexist / non-misogynistic ways, then we should advocate for video game writers and developers to refine and evolve their craft in the way they use these elements, not that they must eliminate them. I guess there is an argument that it's not possible to use these elements in any pop culture mediums in non-sexist / non-misogynistic ways. But here we strike a problem in that you can't frame the debate in terms of video games, because you've got all other forms of popular culture which do use these elements.

But actually the deeper problem, I think, is the online behavior during the normal day to day course of gaming. You could be playing the most innocuous of games online, but if it is competitive and intense, and you're in voice chat (so you can identify (usually) the sex of other players) then chances are if one of the players is a girl misogyny will ensue. And even in the absence of a girl, if you happen to be significantly better than everyone else (i.e. you are kicking arse), or substantially worse than everyone else (your arse is being kicked), then non-gender based harassment is likely to ensue.

An interesting bit of research would be to see whether sex-based harassment and abuse is qualitatively or quantitatively worse than non-gender based harassment and abuse (in proportion to the number of female gamers).

"I hope someone comes over and kills your family." = Non sex-based abuse

I hope someone comes over and shoves a barbed baseball bat up your *********" = Sex-based abuse.

That is, to obtain objective evidence to see whether gamers who abuse other gamers do so generally, and simply try to hit people where it hurts. Or whether these abusive gamers are specifically more excessively abusive to female gamers because they are female.

[snake]

Man, from what I've read on these threads I would think it is time for government to get involved in regulating the Internet. And I'm not trolling here. From cyber bullying to rampant racism and sexism, the Internet can be a very nasty place. We regulate the rest of society, virtual society should be no different.

[Castel]

Man, from what I've read on these threads I would think it is time for government to get involved in regulating the Internet. And I'm not trolling here. From cyber bullying to rampant racism and sexism, the Internet can be a very nasty place. We regulate the rest of society, virtual society should be no different.

Regulate how? The crime of calling in a bomb threat is the same done by phone or not and it naturally carries the same penalties.

The crime of abuse carries the same penalty.

The crime of saying sexist shit on a forum carries the same set of penalties (far smaller in America than in Europe iirc) as saying sexist shit in any other gathering.

You can make harsher laws for violating privacy and doxxing but I don't see where the regulations would come from, especially since it's not just like regulating TV or radio.

[Wise Fool]

I read and comment on Cracked.com's articles a lot, and this issue has been mentioned in three articles lately - one of them written by Zoey herself. The comment section has exploded with each one - the one written by her has over 10,000 comments, surpassing that of any other article by Cracked ever.

A lot - and I mean a lot - of the comments are by newly-created accounts, which I would guess many were created specifically because of this subject. And a depressingly large quantity of posts are of the "Oh, I guess Zoey must have had sex with Cracked staff" derp-tastic variety. Many of them are tinfoil hatters "Quinnspiracy" crap about how the "objective truth" is being censored, men are being repressed, radical feminism (or feminazism, or "radfems," etc) are being so very, very mean - and how Zoey is to blame (either completely, or just mostly) for all the threats and harassment because of her despicable character. It's a nauseating abyss of immature, misogynistic insanity.

Fun fact: I never knew the term "SJW," or "white knight," or "social justice warrior" until I read a Cracked article which was tangentially about sexism. I had to Google these things because all of a sudden it became some sort of hipster internet trend to label my posts under these categories. I don't know, I find it hard to take seriously any sort of internet put-down that is so new and so moronic that it must have come from the minds of whiny dudes who were born when I was graduating high school.

I see it as part of a larger trend of conservatism trying to reclaim it's old, and completely bigoted "principles." It's mirrored by how in the 2000's it became trendy and popular to dismiss any Democrats as being SOCIALIST COMMUNIST TSARIST ANTI-AMERICANS. In short, I blame the Young Republicans. The ones who basically lurched to the right end of the political spectrum as a kind of rebellion against their centrist/liberal parents. The ones who would have voted against Obama, if they'd been old enough to vote.