'GTFO', New Documentary about Female Gamers - Page 36

On March 12 2015 01:15 Plansix wrote:

It also relates directly to sale and marketability. People who make games want to sell them to as many people as possible. If they are losing a section of the audience because of this behavior. If the section of the audience happens to be women and they are unable to sell games to that demographic, they have good reasons to address the issues. For a lot of developers, who want as many people as possible to play their games, the idea of losing the audience that does not want to "get a thicker skin" isn't acceptable.

On March 12 2015 01:17 bardtown wrote:


a) That is an absolutely massive assumption. The fact that trolling/lewd arguing is so common in gaming is an indication that it is popular/part of the culture. Go look at how popular trolling videos are and then tell me it's a minority. TL is the exception, not the rule. I have played games where nobody speaks without cursing every other word.

On March 11 2015 23:49 OtherWorld wrote:

...
I suggest you read my post again. If you still don't get it, here's the thing :
-things such as alcohol tolerance or amount of weight that can be lifted is biological.
-things such as average salary, amount of domestic violence received or given, or society-based discrimination in general is societal.

On March 12 2015 00:58 ZasZ. wrote:


Again, that puts you in a minority. Feel free to enjoy being an asshole to other people, but understand that is not a common view. Muting and reporting systems are not foolproof and do not stop bullying. For one, most of the games where mute functions are necessary rely heavily on team communication, so having to mute your teammate because he is being a dick is counterproductive. I don't consider that a perfect solution. And when trolls get muted and/or banned that just makes them quiet trolls, they don't magically become better people.

And your point about developers gets down to the crux of the argument, if more women were interested in gaming this would no longer be a genre clearly targeted at teenage and young-adult males. More female developers would likely mean more games that are interesting to women, there is no downside to that. It doesn't mean the next Call of Duty won't get made or that there will somehow be less games for gaming's current core demographic to enjoy.

If anything, having more female developers would mean better written female characters, even in our dude games, and that can never be a bad thing. It requires more women being interested in the games industry, which is mostly on them, but we need to not be purposefully excluding them every chance we get either.

On March 12 2015 01:17 bardtown wrote:


a) That is an absolutely massive assumption. The fact that trolling/lewd arguing is so common in gaming is an indication that it is popular/part of the culture. Go look at how popular trolling videos are and then tell me it's a minority. TL is the exception, not the rule. I have played games where nobody speaks without cursing every other word.
b) Female developers will not magically make trolls better people, either. This has nothing to do with gaming. You should make a good parenting thread.
c) Trolls are not communicating usefully in team games, so muting them makes no difference to your chances at winning.
d) Many games implement a system whereby you can choose not to be matched with certain people. I'm sure more will do so in future.
e) There is no shortage of games that appeal to women. We are talking about competitive gaming. You're making broad and inapplicable statements. A game like Call of Duty which features in this documentary is clearly aimed at males. Something like Dota is much more gender neutral.
f) Nobody is purposefully excluding anybody.

On March 12 2015 01:27 levelping wrote:


So okay wait - some people are objecting to things like this documentary on the basis that it is actually only a small minority that actively trolls, and that they just happen to be the loudest. So it is unfair to paint all male gamers with the same brush.

What you're now saying is that a good amount (if not most) people enjoy trolling So doesn't that mean that things like the documentary is partially justified? I would think so. Having an entire community cussing and spewing hate is pretty downright alarming (e.g. I don't have kids now but when I do I would like for them to share their father's love for games without being embarassed that their dad hangs out with trolls all the time - especially if I have a daughter who loves games).

On March 12 2015 01:35 Millitron wrote:

You're dead wrong with the bolded part. Every time there's been a major demographic addition, the original core audience suffers. Remember when CoD first hit it big? And then practically every shooter after it had to try to grab the CoD audience. Even totally unrelated games like Ace Combat did it. Remember when Starcraft Broodwar started to get a huge following? And then every RTS after that had to try to be BW. How many MMO's have been WoW clones?

So basically most devs now try to grab the biggest demographic that might possibly be interested in their game. And that turns off the core audience, who were fans of it when it was an original idea, not a CoD-clone or whatever.

On March 12 2015 01:35 Millitron wrote:

You're dead wrong with the bolded part. Every time there's been a major demographic addition, the original core audience suffers. Remember when CoD first hit it big? And then practically every shooter after it had to try to grab the CoD audience. Even totally unrelated games like Ace Combat did it. Remember when Starcraft Broodwar started to get a huge following? And then every RTS after that had to try to be BW. How many MMO's have been WoW clones?

So basically most devs now try to grab the biggest demographic that might possibly be interested in their game. And that turns off the core audience, who were fans of it when it was an original idea, not a CoD-clone or whatever.

On March 12 2015 01:41 bardtown wrote:


It's a small minority who are just outright aggressive to people without a reason, but it's probably a majority who enjoy controversy (Idra) and who communicate in an offensive manner. In Dota you're just as likely to get somebody insulting you or yelling at you than somebody offering calm advice. Comes with the territory.

On March 12 2015 01:37 ZasZ. wrote:


It may be an assumption, but it's hardly a massive or unreasonable one. I think you are making the unreasonable assumption that because trolls are loud they are overly common, but it just seems that way, and rightfully so. People are more likely to remember the guy who was a dick all game long rather than the other 3 people who were silent or communicated politely.

I never said female developers would make trolls go away, I said it would help bring in a female audience. Aside from online harassment, poor representation of well-written female characters and female perspectives is a problem with a lot of games. There are still a lot of non-narrative games that don't allow you to play as a woman or don't contain any meaningful women characters. No one loses if that situation is improved.

Again, you are making an assumption. Over my 2,000 hours I've run into a lot of good Dota players who in between making useful communications return to abuse. Yeah, the guys who just say "nigger" over and over into voice chat are no-brainer mute fodder, but muting the ultra-competitive players who are trying to win but can't do it without being an asshole hurts your chances of winning the game.

It's great that games are starting to allow blacklists, but in the ones that do it isn't uncommon for people to run out of space on their blacklists or to have dozens and dozens of people on it. You have to hear the abuse before you're able to mute/report someone, and it doesn't keep a completely different person from trying to ruin your experience in the next game. The one thing I do agree with you on is that a lot of this comes to poor parenting in the internet age, but who would have thought you have to teach your children to be as polite on the internet as they would in any other public place?

And yeah, some people are purposefully excluding women, that's the whole point of the discussion. It may be a minority or it may not, but just look at Twitch chat when a woman gets on-stage at an event. You may be able to have a discussion in between the "GRILL" and "8/10 would bang," but that right there is a culture that is exclusionary.

On March 12 2015 01:50 levelping wrote:


Well if that is the case then the majority just facilitates the small agressive minority, by basically consuming the drama that comes out of trolling.

And any way back to my original quesiton - what's wrong with trying to improve the territory, seeing as all these insults and yelling are tangential to the actual game. Is yelling at people that essential to our gaming experience that we need to hold on to it at the expense of other people's enjoyment?

And anyway if Idra is your exmaple, I think it's a rather poor one. The guy got removed from his team for generally being offensive, and EG would not have done that if they thought that everyone ejoyed trolling that much.

And again, the popularity of something isn't indicative of its desirability as a practice.

On March 12 2015 01:50 levelping wrote:


Well if that is the case then the majority just facilitates the small agressive minority, by basically consuming the drama that comes out of trolling.

And any way back to my original quesiton - what's wrong with trying to improve the territory, seeing as all these insults and yelling are tangential to the actual game. Is yelling at people that essential to our gaming experience that we need to hold on to it at the expense of other people's enjoyment?

And anyway if Idra is your exmaple, I think it's a rather poor one. The guy got removed from his team for generally being offensive, and EG would not have done that if they thought that everyone ejoyed trolling that much.

And again, the popularity of something isn't indicative of its desirability as a practice.

On March 12 2015 01:46 levelping wrote:


I don't really get your point. So are you saying that the original core audience of FPS suffered when COD hit it big? Incidentally not all FPS had to try to grab the COD audience, that is plainly wrong. There are plenty of poular and thriving alternatives - Team Fortress, L4D, and of course Counter-strike which came before COD in the first place. There's HALO on the consoles as well.

Or that RTS fans were hurt by... broodwar being popular (I can't believed I just typed that)? Or MMO fans suffered with WoW being released (WoW is pretty much a clone of stuff that came before it anyway, so WoW clones are just continuing the trend)?

On March 12 2015 02:02 bardtown wrote:


I'm talking about Call of Duty a lot because it's the primary game I know will be mentioned in the documentary. But it is not purposeful exclusion to design a game with a target audience in mind and let that audience behave in a natural fashion. They should be under no obligation to cater for people who are not even part of their target demographic. If I wanted to play something that was clearly designed for women, I would accept the differences in the games community.

Nobody is going to develop a competitive game especially for women because it is an insignificant market and the game would have little relevance in the eSports world (and if it did it would likely become dominated by males). It is also not purposeful exclusion when twitch chat says dumb stuff. That's just twitch chat saying dumb stuff (another demonstration btw, of how trolling is an integral part of eSports culture). It is not purposeful exclusion when people are rude in games, because they are rude to everybody. I get told to uninstall/quit on a fairly regular basis. Where there is a significant market, games are made.



Do you really believe that Idra got kicked for that? I'm fairly confident he agreed to that 'kicking' beforehand on the basis that he was not really dedicated to the game and was not performing very well. He had been much more controversial beforehand and was kept on the team. The point is that Idra was hugely popular, regardless of results, because of the controversy surrounding him.

Your idea of 'improving' the community is what exactly? Policing everything people say? Sounds pretty cancerous to me. Yes, I like the fact that we are less obligated to fit some standard of political correctness online than we are in 'real life'. I heard syndereN call sunsfan a jew on his stream earlier. A lifetime ban is in order for that antisemitic remark, don't you think? Fuck that. We know it's not antisemitic. It's a harmless sociolect. People are disgustingly prone to being offended by nothing these days.

On March 12 2015 02:04 Millitron wrote:

Since you brought up halo, look what they've done to it. They added sprint just like in CoD despite it detracting from the game. In earlier halo games, you could move at full speed and fire at the same time; now you have to choose, which makes each shootout a diceroll, just like CoD. Only the BR is any good, meaning every fight is basically the same just like in CoD. Average time to kill is pitifully low, another big feature of CoD. They added load-outs, which are practically the same things as CoD classes; spawning with special abilities and the weapon of your choice. This removes much of the tactical need to control the map, since you no longer need to control the weapon spawns to ensure you get what weapons you want. Halo 4 even had killstreak rewards that they called "ordnance drops".

How many RTS's after BW tried to copy it? Look at the differences between Red Alert 2 and Red Alert 3. RA2 has decentralized resource gathering. You didn't expand to the distant resources, your gatherers went and picked them up. RA3 switched to expansion-based economics, just like SC. RA2 had hardly any units with special abilities, and the ones that did have them were not incredibly powerful. This made RA2 more about commanding large groups than a few spellcasters. RA3 gave every unit a special ability, many of which were insanely powerful. This, combined with RA3 having a population cap (unlike RA2), made RA3 more about commanding a few spellcasters. The smaller numbers mean that matches are more often decided in the first fight, and that fight is generally lame.

On March 11 2015 23:10 Plansix wrote:

I don't deal in overly broad, sweeping discussions about society, because I consider them to be very fruitless exercises that lead to watered down insights that mean little.

On March 11 2015 21:09 Plansix wrote:


Exactly and since one gender is currently repressed and has fewer opportunities, there need to be laws, systems and awareness raised to fix that. Glad we finally got there.

On March 11 2015 23:10 Plansix wrote:
I deal in specifics, like women being harassed in the game industry and hobby. That is a discussion I think some useful insight would come from.

On March 11 2015 22:55 Plansix wrote:

It always amazes me how any time a discussion about women's issues happens on this site its is co-opted by the same group of posters and moves to the most passive aggressive critique of feminism. And then when you try to get back on topic, the claims of straw-manning, fallacies and "not wanting civil discussion" rain down.

On March 11 2015 23:47 Plansix wrote:

That's it folks, he did it. Feminism is over because they can't lift as much as men. Pack up your stuff and lets all go home.

On March 12 2015 01:50 levelping wrote:
And any way back to my original quesiton - what's wrong with trying to improve the territory, seeing as all these insults and yelling are tangential to the actual game. Is yelling at people that essential to our gaming experience that we need to hold on to it at the expense of other people's enjoyment?

On March 12 2015 02:19 levelping wrote:
And lemme put it this way. You might think that all this is an exercise in political correctness. Okay. But is saying "jew" "nigger" "rape" "fag" and so on SO IMPROTANT TO YOU that you must keep saying it even though people might be oversensitive to them?

On March 12 2015 02:49 wei2coolman wrote:
I feel like levelping's ideal world is everyone only speaks in niceties and useless platitudes, in which no one is reasonably allowed to say what they feel. Which is even more ridiculous than telling people to have thicker skin.