[John Mc.]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Rud31]

Hi. I would have linked that video without the uproar. This is the first one of her videos that I felt said something I wanted to share.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[Corinth]

I think the stances are less "ANITA IS GREAT" and "ANITA IS TERRIBLE" and more "Anita's points are generally pretty cogent" and "ANITA IS [A] TERRIBLE [FEMINAZI RUINING VIDEOGAMES]." Earnest people (including game developers who have worked on games she mentions!) seem to have no problem engaging her ideas, while frothing monsters seem to prefer to launch assaults (both literal and figurative) on her person. Making it about Anita herself is already choosing to miss the point of her project.

[diplo]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

The very last thing I'll say here is that I don't think John Mc. is at all off-base in identifying a politics of shame that plays into the discussion of these issues, not just Anita specifically but much of the cultural sphere she is aligned with and playing into.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[misadventurous]

yeah ni go i dont consider you to be one of the e-shitlords & if i came off like i was lumping you in with them, i didnt mean to. sorry for being a dick in any case.

[username]

John Mc is the only one here who seemed to stumble upon one of the main driving forces here, which is that regardless of the accuracy of her points she is still (at least coming off as) an outsider. History is full of examples of well meaning outsiders trying to offer advice and criticism of a group and its practices; it is not full of examples of said group taking that well.

The response to her is still remarkably unfortunate.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[Brooks]

She doesn't seem like an outsider

I mean simply for having played all this shit she's more on it than I or most of my peers are

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I believe she's freely admitted in the past that she's not an avid gamer and has had to do extensive research in compiling the videos.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Brooks]

In any case we should be hugely suspicious of the whole insider/outsider narrative, especially when "insider" comes across a euphemism for inured zealot

[Dracko]

[capgamer]

Hi there! I'm not really privy to the drama surrounding this issue or the death threats, etc. I am watching the video in the original post and it seems as though Anita has maybe unreasonably high expectations for what video games are/should be and allow for in their choices. At about the 15 minute mark she's talking about how Watchdogs has a random event where you stop a woman from being beat up in a back alleyway or whatever and is talking about how you can't call for an ambulance to help her or anything after saving her.

This kind of seems like missing the point of the encounter. It's meant to be a quick event the player can choose to engage in, and making it a long drawn out affair where you have to get her to an ambulance or something would kind of detract from the intended pace of the event. It's not that the women have been "casually discarded" so much as that the event itself isn't really important in the grand scheme of things. She seems to think that because it involves violence against women that it by its very necessity needs to be a primary focus of the game, which is a bit odd to me, considering it's just one of many crimes that you deal with.

To me, it kind of takes credence away from her argument, because it seems like she's nitpicking things that really aren't that big of a deal. There's definitely some good examples in this video, and making a shorter video with a focus on the worse examples would probably be more productive than long videos that dwell on pretty tame occurrences of violence against women that aren't really examples of what she seems to be making the video about.

'We are perfectly willing to suspend our disbelief when it comes to multiple lives, super powers, health regeneration, and the ability to carry dozens of weapons in a massive, invisible backpack. But somehow, the idea of a world without sexual violence and exploitation as being (sic) too strange and too bizarre to be believable."

The driving conflict in so many games could be described as "human evil" and I think if you take the above set of sentences from her video and replace "sexual violence and exploitation" with "human evil" you don't really change the meaning of them. It is a means to show evil and encourage the player to fight it. Not saying it's not badly done and problematic in a lot of games, and I'm glad someone is calling them out on it, but... I don't think you can stop the buck at just sexual violence.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[mauve]

as someone who's spent a lot of time with game design, i can safely say we need more outsiders. the more the better. most of the endless loop of making same stuff comes from people who already know videogames and are so used to all the stupid shit they do that they don't even think twice about how ridiculous it is. it's like how conan o'brien's clueless gamer segment is actually really insightful as to how absurd videogame-logic has gotten.

i don't think we should fault someone for wanting higher standards; you can call it nitpicking but overall they're still valid points. remember that the focus of her video set is about the treatment of women, not necessarily the focus of the game itself. in this case, it's particularly about them being used as props. some of them are analogous to the treatment of male characters overall, but not all.

like, seriously, the presentation being hamfisted doesn't discredit the point itself.

[CubaLibre]

[evnvnv]

[Rei]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

One thing of note regarding Anita's harrassment: as disgusting as it is, it's a little disingenuous to act like it's representative of some startling new phenomenon that can only be explained by endemic misogyny. "Gamers" heaping anonymous abuse on people by whom they feel attacked is neither new nor specific to any one particular subset of gamer subculture (e.g. 4chan); just ask Tim, or Jack Thompson, or whatsisname from Penny Arcade, all of whom were bombarded with online harassment, including rape and death threats, for saying things which made (some) gamers angry. Heck, this phenomenon isn't even unique to video game subculture: consider how fans reacted to the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion, or look up what happened to that poor kid who played Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace.

I'm not saying much of the vitriol directed at Anita doesn't carry misogynistic overtones, or at least reach for misogyny as the lowest and bluntest tool of rhetorical aggression on the shelf, and maybe it's truly more vicious and sustained in character than prior examples; but I do think it's worth questioning why her case has come to be seen as groundbreakingly horrific, and why it seems to be interpreted by default as a vindication of her arguments.

[MattCD42]

Here's what I don't get about all the back and forth.
It doesn't really matter if anita herself is a 'gamer' or not, weather or not she 'stole' let's players footage or not to make her videos. Her points remain the same. The personal attacks are disgusting.

But her arguments are very small when you get down to it. I understand that the examples she uses aren't the best, and thankfully this is the first video where she thankfully didn't evoke Mario which always seems silly. But that's the problem her argument rests not so much on the specific examples she uses and some are stronger than others but rather the volume of them.

What I really took her to be arguing in this video was that we should have women represented as more than mothers, tragic lover interests, and whores in games. Of course there are exceptions. But the ratios are way off.

I mean ya sure this game or that game may have an excuse, but could we ask our games put in more women with different roles?

It just seems so small to me at the end of the day.
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Steam: Godamn_Milkman

[misadventurous]

[capgamer]

[capgamer]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Another nitpick about her examples in this video, while we're still on the subject: apparently the Hitman footage depicting the player character dragging and hiding a stripper's corpse is something that only occurs if the player defies their mission objective and kills civilians (the strippers), for which they are actively penalized. Doesn't change the quasi-exploitative setup, but that sounds like basically the equivalent of using a clip of a player murdering hookers in GTA as representative of those games' content: it is something that can happen in the game, but only if the player deliberately chooses to do so, which is not quite the same thing contextually as a scripted event or mandatory objective.

I don't think wanting to see a greater variety of roles for women in games is a particularly controversial sentiment, at least when it's not framed in an accusatory way. But maybe I'm just being naive about the degree to which some people will react with knee-jerk rage to even the tamest suggestion of sharing their toys with the girls.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Reed]

I've seen plenty of knee-jerk rage on both sides tbh. I see some stuff these indie game dev people are posting on twitter and it makes me wonder, is the vitriol supposed to make me want to agree with you? cuz when you tell random people to go kill themselves, it makes me think you might be in the wrong.
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hi it's reed
this is where i stream now

[diplo]

[Reed]

[EnDevero]

I think the Watch Dogs example might be easier to understand for some people if you take away the female angle and just use it as an example of how media is often sloppy in how it treats -victims- in general. Games often use victims as excuses to harm the perpetrator rather than framing the victims as real people in need of help. You see this sort of thing all over media-- victims are just disposable casualties while the narrative focuses on a thrilling hunt for the bad guy who caused all the harm. This treatment of victims just gets all the more problematic when the victims are women because of the pre-existing problems with portrayals of women.

I'm not sure if I believe that these portrayals directly cause problems in the real world exactly (I'm just not sure yet), but I definitely think they are representative of already-existing issues. When I see how victims are represented in media, I can't help but draw comparisons to how people around me often talk bout strong vs weak. I mean, victim blaming is everywhere in our society and our media seems to reflect that disregard for those that are oppressed.

[diplo]

[capgamer]

[EnDevero]

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean :)

[username]

[Corinth]

I'm sure that if Jade Raymond were doing this series there would be absolutely no misogynist blowback and all of these dudes would be happy hearing about sexism in their videogames from an "insider."

[Riff Rex]

Man it's times like these that make me bitterly wish my game got Kickstarted...for immature reasons perhaps. I wanted a heroine (Pyrella) to violently castrate a patriarchal cult in a fantastical prehistory. That was the subtext that drove me. I know violence against men is not the answer to the industry's systematic misogyny, but I sure had fun with that concept (I mean, they were corrupt and prejudiced dudes).

I've worked on a couple of AAA crapfests at WB/Snowblind Studios in the past. Watching this video, I could only think of the devs who actually model, texture and animate these virtual women, spend months coding this gross shit. The art director had a "rule" about minimum boob size for the character artists. Mind blowing. Now I'm long out of that rat race, much poorer, but glad to have left the infantile echo chamber behind me. They all suck. There is no chance for artistic growth of any kind. No culture beyond comics, sci-fi TV, anime, and other video games.

Ok, I just had to throw my indignation out there. Good work, Anita. Also Rei, I really like your writings about Kojima.
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I wish I could talk in technicolour

[Schwere Viper]

[parker]

[Reed]

[Brooks]

[| BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE |]

Can we make "fuck videogames forever" the official sb tagline. Have someone record a jingle with the melody of Strawberry Fields

Can we get Anita on national TV. I want her to have the fortune and fame that will enable her to piss off even more idiots, more safely. Also, what would the reaction from normal people be, you think? I guess most people think videogames are dumb and/or bad anyway so this might work in our favor here. And how would they react to Anita's trolls? If negatively: would that quiet them down because they would all of a sudden realize how socially inappropriate they are being (well it's not really that, just fear to be in the minority)? Works pretty well against neo-nazis here so why not against nerds. I'll probably donate to feminist frequency for this reason. The problem needs more attention, Anita's who we've got, who's got the most attention, so let's build on that. She'll be the mainstream and when she gets big enough others will get some spotlight as well.

I think Anita is spot on with pointing out all the misogynistic crap in videogames. I don't care for her suggestions on improving them though. No, not everything has to have gravitas and whatever else she'd like to see. You can make points about violence even with floaty, throwaway violence, if you know how. That's art: you can basically do everything with every tool available — if you're creative and your heart's in the right spot. But sure, maybe I'm taking that too seriously and she was taking about one possible way to improve things. Yeah, why not

If summarize the situation as videogames excelling at dehumanizing everybody, just so your hands have something to do. Everybody's just a sidequest or a setpiece in this unsophisticated world. No doubt though that women get it a million times worse than any other group of people.

Her advice on how to change the stupidly sexist Lego for girls — and their advertisement — was very good though. And those two videos on Lego are actually her best. This thread's video comes second. (I have not yet seen all of her videos)

In this thread's video she made clear she didn't think rape or violence against women could never appear in videogames. But in another video about GQ magazine and the sexualization of young girls it seemed like she was against objectification of women in general, in a way I disagree with. It's 100% a case of "I don't understand male sexual desires, thus they are immoral."

Like how it's terrible that men jerk off to women even when they aren't depicted as "whole" people. And that young boys are being trained by that to have no sexual empathy. What she doesn't know is that there is evidence that the male brain tends to process sexual desire fundamentally different and that emotion and sexual desire are separated systems in men, yet not in women. Which makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Also, men indeed naturally "objectify" women in the sense that they need nothing more than a single physical sexual turn on to get psychologically aroused. And masturbate to orgasm. *blush* Women generally don't pay for pictures of men's butts and jerk off to them, even though they think they are sexy. Men do, and so do some cousins of ours in the animal kingdom, if you know of that crazy experiment.

Also, to be sexually attracted to "high school age" girls is not inherently dangerous or wrong, like attraction to prepubescents. It might be counterintuitive to her because youth doesn't play a role in female sexual desire but for men youth is THE key piece to sexual attraction. Again this makes perfect evolutionary sense as well. So yeah, 20 year olds posing as 17 or 16 year old is not a problem and neither is it about a "fantasy about corrupting innocence", but about a woman's remaining fertile years, which interestingly is more important to men than to primates, who care only about immediate fertility and thus prefer mature females who have achieved regular ovulation. It's actually quite romantic if you see it that way! Men are in for the long haul when they lust after jailbait and don't just want to hit it and quit it! Or something

The last two paragraphs are not to say that objectification of women or fantasies about young girls belong in the mainstream though. They decidedly don't. They belong into porn, the bedrooms of consenting adults, etc. There they aren't harmful.

In conclusion: I recommend she reads A Billion Wicked Thoughts

[| BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE |]

[parker]

I don't think Roberta's put a game out since the nineties and just sails around on a yacht with her husband now
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