It is so depressing because if this was the east nobody would care at all about these things. I mean ZOMGSH this and that. It is stupid and a waste of time; when we could be creating things. It is like we will never do greatness at all.
Feminism as we generally understand it has less of a presence/isn't as developed of a movement in Japan, in particular. In any case it's pretty ridiculous to think that things done in the name of feminism are impeding
greatness in video games or even creativity at all. Contrary to the general noise surrounding the subject gamers who either explicitly identify as feminist or are sympathetic to feminism are a minority, compared to people who aren't invested in social issues as they relate to gaming (majority) or represent the side opposite feminists or various social justice things (another minority). It maintains its mindshare because video gaming is becoming more of a mainstream/accepted hobby and the concept of being able to appeal/be sensitive to more audiences (by marketing or by what gets made) is of note to some companies. "Our game is LGBTQ positive", "this is sexist", "the lead protagonist is an independent female," etc. That is marketable to some people. Games sometimes recycle tropes to appeal to conventional tastes and easier money - ranging from the socially non-insidious (spiky haired hero with a sword defeats bad guy with power of friendship) to bs like "women are harder to animate" and such
Back in college when I was making minimum-wage. Their was this special area where they hold seminars. Anybody can rent it out and do whatever they want their. We could even hold an convention as well. This lady ( who seems to have a book in the Opera magazine from my memory ) was giving speeches. At the end a woman broke down ( like if it was a church ) crying about her problems.
"Now I'm not saying anything...but I'm just saying!"
A+ dude, A+
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As for hashtag gamergate, though I actually support a lot of the things she stands for I've soured on her writing over time. It started with this piece she wrote on Sonic the Hedgehog for The Guardian that was pretty poorly handled. This is another one of those things - it's something that's poorly messaged so it was too easy to take issue with the concept of "gamer" being an outdated term (I don't really use it myself because I think it's too broad, but w/e) and then after that you have the customary application of identity politics. Yes I agree that video games and the industry are often easier to enjoy for straight white dudes, and that the sense of persecution/ostracizing felt as a gamer is sometimes more imagined than real (plus the whole nerd to hero thing is so played, just look at Silicon Valley). I even agree with the general idea that you can't truly separate gaming from social issues or the views of a group
and I do think the meaning of objectivity in gaming media is looking its consensus definition, at least in part because sometimes "objectivity" has to serve some goal by the person defining it. Objectivity doesn't always lead to one opinion; on a separate note, sometimes gamers have a skewed definition of what objectivity is, for example a hypothetical "Mass Effect is objectively the best game of 20XX" statement. I can't turn down journalistic integrity - it's just not always the best place for identity politics when critiquing authors/outlets. Polygon
does write something good once in a while, even if they're shuttering most of their long form pieces. It's one thing to be suspicious of consistent positive promotion of Microsoft games. And like, I just cannot weigh feminism and misogyny equally. I'm not going to get with a movement that presupposes the devaluation of a gender for no reason. Hate misogynist jokes also.
her piece reads like a rallying point but they don't need a rallying point. Social justice sympathizers however small are pretty mobilized already. We don't need polemic right now. The worst part of misogynist groups are the Anita Sarkeesian harasser types. Now you have this stupid thing where you have people showing some people saying that these people are worse than Hitler, and the other side showing that the people on other group are worse than Hitler. Whatever. A feminist teacher has attacked a kid once, it was on the news a couple of weeks ago. I feel sorry for the kid, feminism is not devalued as a school of thought because of that.
regardless I do take away from this a reinforcement of the idea that gaming media, like commercial media at large, easily converges to "infotainment" like 25 Reasons Mass Effect is lol or signaling to tastes you're already interested in, as Eric Kain wrote about. What's editorial and what isn't and when it's there and when it isn't is more a product of design.
I enjoyed this read on the subject.
https://medium.com/@upstreamism/to-fair-minded-proponents-of-gamergate-7f3ce77301bb
