Gamergate and video game journalism - Page 28

"I think it's fair to be called out on your shit," he told The Escapist.

"I think that it's a sad man that can never be self-reflective. I think that we tried to go and carry ourselves with respect, and try to respect sexuality and respect gender as much as we can, and sometimes we fail but hopefully we'll do better and continue to get better."

On October 19 2014 03:41 Trumpet wrote:
Just to give some perspective because this "just make your own games" "boycott the bad ones" thing is being said a lot... I don't think many feminists are calling for boycotts of games with bad elements. Most I see are trying to raise awareness about the issues in them so the developers can address is better next time around.

Stuff like this from the creative director of Volition, company that made Saints Row:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-09-02-volition

"I think it's fair to be called out on your shit," he told The Escapist.

"I think that it's a sad man that can never be self-reflective. I think that we tried to go and carry ourselves with respect, and try to respect sexuality and respect gender as much as we can, and sometimes we fail but hopefully we'll do better and continue to get better."

On October 19 2014 03:56 WolfintheSheep wrote:


That kind of comment from Saints Row staff seems exactly like the kind of thing that people are taking issue with.

Saints Row is a game that's entirely about taking the "gangster" life and pushing it to the most ridiculous extreme. And that happens to involve strippers and hoes. It also involves taking a ball-gagged man and forcing him to pull a pony cart while you gun down dominatrices who are on similar pony carts. It's that kind of game.

So when a creative director of the franchise says things like "we should do better", what does that really mean? I mean, the player character is already extremely customizable, where you can be male, female, fat, old, anorexic, white, black, Asian, purple, metallic gold. And there are a number of female characters in it that are interesting and colourful without existing as eye-candy (I think the latest DLC for SR4 lets you play as Gat and Kenzie, purely because of the popularity of both).

It reminds me a lot of the complaints about Duke Nukem Forever, how it's juvenile, sexist, overly macho...everything that Duke Nukem is expected to be. Of course, it didn't help that the game was poorly made, but there's something silly about asking a game to clean itself up despite being exactly what it's intended to be.

He also praised some of the decisions the studio had made in regard to the sex workers portrayed in the game.

"It's very minor but it means something to me. We never call a woman a 'ho' in Saints Row 4, we call them sex workers. We respect that that's their position and we don't take a cheap shot at them for that. It's a minor thing, but it's something ... It's the right thing to do," he explained.

On October 19 2014 01:51 kwizach wrote:

First of all, she didn't scam people. She is clearly publishing the videos she said she would make with the money. You can argue that she should be making them faster, but going slower than expected is certainly not the same as scamming, so you can drop that asinine accusation.

Second, she doesn't argue that video games are inherently sexist. She denounces sexist tropes and gender roles that can often be found in plenty of video games, historically and currently. Plenty of other people have done the same thing for video games and a plethora of other media/productions, including theater plays, movies, and literature. You can criticize certain aspects of some of the individual examples that she uses to illustrate her points, but her argument pertains to the systemic level and is not limited to the individual examples she chooses. It's an accurate criticism of an underlying problem, and it is certainly not a "defamation to men". I don't see how being rightfully critical of problematic aspects of video game production hurts the industry - if anything, it's the right kind of approach that may help the industry gain popularity among some groups that may not have initially been attracted to video games because of such gender issues.

To sum up, not only is she not a "horrible human being", but you seem to completely miss the point of her argument, misunderstand her, and generally misunderstand issues of gender roles and feminism more broadly.


What a ridiculously terrible argument. Since when can one not be critical of certain aspects of a type of production without having to engage him-/herself in that type of production? If you lived in a world where negative racial stereotypes were prevalent in movies, could you not be critical of that without having to start making movies yourself? Why the hell would someone have to become a video games developer just because that person is unhappy with some aspects of video games? What is supposed to be "lazy" about wanting to do something else in your life, and how exactly does not wanting to make video games yourself invalidate anything you might want to say about video games?


Sarkeesian (and feminists in general) also denounces negative gender roles and stereotypes associated with men, and in this case the tendency to present male characters as overly muscular. The point is, however, than being reduced to the sexual appeal you will have for other people can be considered worse than being the carrier a distorted idea of self-empowerment through musculature. Those muscles are linked to the idea of "being capable", which is a positive empowerment idea, while the sexual attributes are linked to the idea of "being desirable", which is there to satisfy other people and is not associated with competence (often quite the opposite). Huge muscles can also be linked to the context of the video games in question, in particular in games where violence and athletic abilities are used. This is not the same at all for the overly sexual depictions of female characters. In short, both types of depictions are problematic, but the differences between the two still have to be highlighted and the particularly negative aspects of the depiction of women in games (and elsewhere) cannot be overlooked. This is again not to say that you cannot find plenty of exceptions to such depictions, but the systemic problem is still there. Plenty of studies on the topic have been published - see for example Burgess, Melinda C R, Steven Paul Stermer and Stephen R Burgess (2007), "Sex, Lies, and Video Games: The Portrayal of Male and Female Characters on Video Game Covers", Sex Roles, Vol. 57, No. 5, 419-433.


No, that's not necessarily true at all. The fact that people buy games which contain sexist tropes cannot be taken to necessarily mean that the people in question actually largely support the presence of those sexist elements and would not be buying the same games were those aspects removed or toned down.

On October 19 2014 01:51 kwizach wrote:

First of all, she didn't scam people. She is clearly publishing the videos she said she would make with the money. You can argue that she should be making them faster, but going slower than expected is certainly not the same as scamming, so you can drop that asinine accusation.

Second, she doesn't argue that video games are inherently sexist. She denounces sexist tropes and gender roles that can often be found in plenty of video games, historically and currently. Plenty of other people have done the same thing for video games and a plethora of other media/productions, including theater plays, movies, and literature. You can criticize certain aspects of some of the individual examples that she uses to illustrate her points, but her argument pertains to the systemic level and is not limited to the individual examples she chooses. It's an accurate criticism of an underlying problem, and it is certainly not a "defamation to men". I don't see how being rightfully critical of problematic aspects of video game production hurts the industry - if anything, it's the right kind of approach that may help the industry gain popularity among some groups that may not have initially been attracted to video games because of such gender issues.

To sum up, not only is she not a "horrible human being", but you seem to completely miss the point of her argument, misunderstand her, and generally misunderstand issues of gender roles and feminism more broadly.


What a ridiculously terrible argument. Since when can one not be critical of certain aspects of a type of production without having to engage him-/herself in that type of production? If you lived in a world where negative racial stereotypes were prevalent in movies, could you not be critical of that without having to start making movies yourself? Why the hell would someone have to become a video games developer just because that person is unhappy with some aspects of video games? What is supposed to be "lazy" about wanting to do something else in your life, and how exactly does not wanting to make video games yourself invalidate anything you might want to say about video games?


Sarkeesian (and feminists in general) also denounces negative gender roles and stereotypes associated with men, and in this case the tendency to present male characters as overly muscular. The point is, however, than being reduced to the sexual appeal you will have for other people can be considered worse than being the carrier a distorted idea of self-empowerment through musculature. Those muscles are linked to the idea of "being capable", which is a positive empowerment idea, while the sexual attributes are linked to the idea of "being desirable", which is there to satisfy other people and is not associated with competence (often quite the opposite). Huge muscles can also be linked to the context of the video games in question, in particular in games where violence and athletic abilities are used. This is not the same at all for the overly sexual depictions of female characters. In short, both types of depictions are problematic, but the differences between the two still have to be highlighted and the particularly negative aspects of the depiction of women in games (and elsewhere) cannot be overlooked. This is again not to say that you cannot find plenty of exceptions to such depictions, but the systemic problem is still there. Plenty of studies on the topic have been published - see for example Burgess, Melinda C R, Steven Paul Stermer and Stephen R Burgess (2007), "Sex, Lies, and Video Games: The Portrayal of Male and Female Characters on Video Game Covers", Sex Roles, Vol. 57, No. 5, 419-433.


No, that's not necessarily true at all. The fact that people buy games which contain sexist tropes cannot be taken to necessarily mean that the people in question actually largely support the presence of those sexist elements and would not be buying the same games were those aspects removed or toned down.