Oh, but I'm sure there is a gray area out there! For example, let's send death threats only on the odd days, doxx only the blond female developers or formulate threats of rape only in a polite way!
You see? There is a lot of leeway for a compromise!
Adam Baldwin and Conventions
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Oh, but I'm sure there is a gray area out there! For example, let's send death threats only on the odd days, doxx only the blond female developers or formulate threats of rape only in a polite way!
You see? There is a lot of leeway for a compromise!
Okay, very good.
Hope you eventually do get the chance to watch the videos though, they're worth the time.
It's make-believe, it's fake and not the worst thing anybody has done in a videogame...
I've killed virtually millions of NPCs in video games, male and female and i'm a relativly normal and sort-of balanced person...
Rockstar actually put a mission in GTA 5 where you have to torture a guy with the sole purpose to make the player uncomfortable with it or atleast to think about how it is not good to torture people(my default stance on it, so that mission was accomplished before i played the game)...
But there will still be people who will go "Cool, you can torture a guy!", no doubt the same kind of people who are now siding with those GamerGate idiots...
I can seperate real from fake and i do think when it comes to videogames they should get up to speed with literature, movies and tv in how they portray men, women and the dynamics between them...
Watched both videos, mainly because she's really hot.
She makes a lot of valid points, but I do think that she does a disservice to some players by failing to differentiate more between the actions of players and the actions of NPC villians. If the player is given the opportunity to do horrible things to a female character and they take it, that obviously draws on a dark place in that player - but if they witness something bad happen to a female character and are driven to do something about it, that draws on some of our very best impulses, IMO. The argument can be made that there are too many "damsel in distress" characters, but you know what? Sometimes the damsel IS in distress. Hell, sometimes middle aged guys are! (And it just *might* speak to a sort of sexism in the other direction that programmers and writers know that most of us will be more easily driven to follow a plot to save or avenge a vulnerable woman than we will to do the same for some guy. I'd complain more, but I'm actually GLAD it's that way. If you're ever given a choice to save either me or a young woman, save the woman.)
It DOES seem, the more I think about it, that morality in general is greatly diminished in modern games. I remember in the old Police Quest game, there was a very attractive woman named Helen Hots that you pulled over at one point. The game gave you lots of options to do wrong things in relation to her - and if you did anything other than your duty in pulling her over and ticketing her for speeding, you got fired and the game ended. (She was the chief's niece or something.) I can't imagine many games trying to teach a moral or lesson like that these days.
Only millions? The Kilrathi homeworld had a population in the billions, and I ran the mission to blow that up twice. And the Death Star had a crew of over 100,000 and I've lost count of how many times I've blown that up. Not to mention the millions I've nuked in Civilization.
My point being that just because they aren't shown as individuals on screen doesn't mean they aren't NPCs, and if anything, training kids to kill without even having to think about those hidden numbers of individuals might be just as bad as the interpersonal stuff. (If they aren't the sort of weird kid I was who was always concerned with all those virtual people, anyway, and got mad at friends for torturing Sims.
)
That's not the central trope she's talking about in those videos. You can find her analysis of the damsel-in-distress trope with further searching on YouTube.
But the question of whether objectification is happening is not affected -- and this is a point she makes quite carefully and plainly in a number of places (such as the first five minutes of the first video) -- just by whether the player is invited to abuse the objects. Male viewers, I think, tend to fixate immediately on the examples involving overt player violence against the objectified women-as-background because they're the most intensely embarrassing and shaming and likeliest to provoke defensiveness, which I think is fairly obviously the impulse that thunderf00t's failed "debunkings" came from. But the overt player violence is only part of the point, and of the functioning of the trope.
Even where the player's role is ostensibly positive and "heroic" -- like rescuing interchangeable battered women or breaking up sex-trafficking rings in Watchdogs, say -- the women involved in all of the examples are still essentially background decoration, without any agency or character or larger meaning to the game world except to provide a bit of eroticizing "gritty" flavour and act as objects of sexual desire. Being invited to "rescue" sexualized ciphers of the kind identified by the trope isn't anything at all like being invited to sympathize with actual human female characters, and it doesn't necessarily speak to our "very best impulses" IMO, quite the reverse.
Indeed it's very easy to use such background-decoration women as an excuse to feel good about objectification, employing them as fodder for stories that employ sexual abuse and violence against women to titillate the player while also giving them the cathartic out of revenging the very violence that titillated them. (Arguably what's going on in the sex-slave auction scene from Watchdogs that thunderf00t gets so worked up about, though I can't quite remember if she spells it out in exactly that way. This is actually a common pattern in a lot of fiction, not just videogames.)
That's of course without even getting into the use of disposable sex objects for cheap villain and/or antihero development that she discusses in Part 2.
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Some of that is obviously very valid. But some of it borders on ridiculous, IMO, and I'll explain why I say that: We aren't talking about real women. We *are* talking about background characters. Putting them in situations where the player abuses them (or any character meant to represent a sentient being), or showing violence happening to them just gratuitously, is bad. But ultimately, they *are* background characters. You can't demand that every female character in every game have as well a developed backstory and personality as the main player character just because supposedly not having them with one would be "sexist" or "objectification" somehow. None of the ghosts in Pac-man had very well thought out back stories or personalities, and four fifths of them were male! The queen in chess is the most powerful piece on the board, but we don't even know her name. They aren't real people - they ARE objects, in game terms.
My point being that while, yes, there is too much gratuitous sex and violence in games these days, *sometimes* a stormtrooper is just a stormtrooper and we don't need to worry overly much about whether the Empire has good survivor benefits for his family before we shoot him and 20 others just like him to clear a level in a Star Wars game.
My point being that while, yes, there is too much gratuitous sex and violence in games these days, *sometimes* a stormtrooper is just a stormtrooper and we don't need to worry overly much about whether the Empire has good survivor benefits for his family before we shoot him and 20 others just like him to clear a level in a Star Wars game.
Some of that is obviously very valid. But some of it borders on ridiculous, IMO, and I'll explain why I say that: We aren't talking about real women. We *are* talking about background characters. Putting them in situations where the player abuses them (or any character meant to represent a sentient being), or showing violence happening to them just gratuitously, is bad. But ultimately, they *are* background characters. You can't demand that every female character in every game have as well a developed backstory and personality as the main player character just because supposedly not having them with one would be "sexist" or "objectification" somehow. None of the ghosts in Pac-man had very well thought out back stories or personalities, and four fifths of them were male! The queen in chess is the most powerful piece on the board, but we don't even know her name. They aren't real people - they ARE objects, in game terms.
My point being that while, yes, there is too much gratuitous sex and violence in games these days, *sometimes* a stormtrooper is just a stormtrooper and we don't need to worry overly much about whether the Empire has good survivor benefits for his family before we shoot him and 20 others just like him to clear a level in a Star Wars game.
Well, it was nice of you to argue with strawmen that neither Sarkeesian nor BigJake set up for you.
It is worth asking, however, how many "walking through a stripper's dressing room" or brothel scenes are actually necessary as background at all. The point she's making is that developers often go out of their way to include these elements because they're expected, and whether they make for interesting storytelling or not.
Now, obviously there are stories in which underworld settings specifically designed to objectify women would fit. But even then, there are vastly different ways to treat them. There is no law that forces developers to populate them with non-playable sex objects designed to spout variations of "love you long time" or "you're so handsome I'll give you a freebie," or to be shot or stabbed for cheap thrills or throwaway villainy. (EDIT: And there is almost never a male equivalent of those NPSOs. If the Star Wars game exists where stormtroopers meet any of the NPSO criteria I have yet to encounter it; that certainly is a strawman, as RobMax points out.) And arguably there are a lot more compelling and interesting ways to use even these settings which do make their inhabitants, including the women, part of the story.
So it doesn't wash to claim that she is demanding that all female background characters be fully-rounded and developed. She's simply questioning how and why a specific kind of sexualized female background character became so prevalent, and whether it necessarily needs to be that way.
Who's arguing? What you were actually getting there was really just more of a stream of consciousness. I'm really not awake yet this morning. 
As I recall you could either give her a ticket or let her go. If you let her go she gave you her phone-number and if you dialed that number the chief will answer the phone, fire you, and the game ended. But it was possible to let her go with the verbal warning and continue the game if you left it there. You just didn't get the points for completing that task. Which in the grand-scheme of things didn't matter, you could still beat the game without having all of the points, but the "completest" in you would be unsatisfied and I think the game said something like, "Looks like you missed something, why don't you play again and find out what!"
A Summary Of The Gamergate Movement That We Will Immediately Change If Any Of Its Members Find Any Details Objectionable
(An amusing satirical piece reporting on GG)
(An amusing satirical piece reporting on GG)
SVU is doing a Gamergate episode next Wednesday. Wonder how these people are gonna react to that.
Preview of the L&O SVU "Gamergate" episode.
Just read the comments.
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6I1VQTkrCU[/yt]
Luckily for us, someone has been kind enough to concisely summarize their content (and their competence) here.
Oh geez.
Although I liked this one:
"If you were any more transparent I'd be installing you on my living room wall facing the yard."
Good thing they didn't do this when Adam Baldwin himself appeared on SVU...as a cop, no less.
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