Tagging. Reading later, thanks for this!

Whoa. For an instant, I thought Tachikoma and Tamron were the same person.

We get that a lot.

Tagging.

Sorry for that lame post. But it's 4:22 am right now. I'm a little tipsy, and I need to go to sleep.

But I want to read this and probably comment when I'm in better shape. I always enjoy your inputs on the forums. So I had to give this a "reminder".

Looking forward to reading this when I come back from work tomorrow (actually... later today... x__X ).

Too long, I have not time to read it at the moment. Tagging for later read. Thanks for your effort, already.

Tachikoma, in your metaphor I assume the "angry bear" is supposed to be "people who are angry at Anita Sarkeesian", and "the woman who poked it" is Sarkeesian herself? My two cents is that Sarkeesian is of the gender/culture studies academic tradition. That tradition is of limited worth as it spends far too much time navel gazing inside the ivory tower and far too little time making sure it's grounded in (and relevant for) the real world.

However. The right of any citizen to have an opinion and express that opinion is imperative in a democratic society. The right to disagree by means of threats and harassment, on the other hand, is non-existent. Let's be clear that this is the "angry bear" you're talking about here.

And let's take note that it is in fact not a bear or an animal at all. It's an anonymous internet mob, made up of a number of human beings. Each with absolute control of how they choose to go about things. The problem here is that these individuals who make up "the bear" got their idea of online morals from anonymous imageboard culture - where anonymous threats and harassment are embraced and a non-issue, due to:

1) On an anonymous imageboard you have no identity unless you choose to have one, and no one can do you harm beyond saying mean things. Mean things which anyone can shrug off with the next post, since every new post gives them a new identity.

2) This means that on anonymous imageboards, internet isn't serious business. Internet is a magical kingdom where you're free to threaten, harass and be a jerk in general.

So the problem we're having here is basically that people grew accustomed to these "rules" of anonymous internet posting, and now they have a sense of absolute entitlement to embrace mindless mob behaviour (including threats and harassment). Failing to realize that these "rules" don't apply to their interaction with public persons (e.g. Sarkeesian) who are exercising their democratic right to make their opinions known.

Threatening and harassing Sarkeesian - through twitter, phone calls or whatever - is serious business. 4chan rules are no longer in effect.

The rules that apply are the rules of democratic society. Everyone has a right to make their opinion known. Anyone has a right to disagree. This right to disagree does not include a right to threaten and harass. This holds true notwithstanding whether the person you disagree with is reasonable or not. Arguing, as you Tachikoma seem to be doing, that the right to make your opinion heard without being threatened and harassed is revoked if your opinion is stupid enough, is - yes! - ipso facto victim blaming. That's got nothing to do with gender politics, or left and right, or whatever. That's a core tenet of democratic society.

Thanks Tachikoma.
I agree based on leaks and observation it's clear there are corrupt practices that drive media coverage. But not all media coverage, and we can't just blame the media for the problem without also blaming the potentially underhanded machinations of the inherently capitalist entities behind game publication. Also, I think it's important to not get nostalgic for older days in gaming journalism because from the 80s up to ten years ago it isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic or critical quality and integrity that gave everyone due coverage, either...

Additionally, sexism in games is an issue that has been sensationalized by internet media, but that doesn't mean its an issue that doesn't exist.It's more a problem of culture in general than any fault of the industry, though. "Mainstream" gaming just shows this culture a bit more than other mediums because it's still geared to the teen-twenty male demographic. It's an easy target.
It's an issue in the way of the industry's maturity, but not the only or even the most important one. (if publishers are so much at the mercy of good press as you say they are, though, then the best outcome I can imagine of this is that companies will become more aware of the content in their games.)

In terms of dev environment, though, at least its thankfully now in most ways better than in the early 2000s at large American companies!

You assume incorrectly.

Also, you do indeed have a right to express your opinion, however exercising common sense in doing so is down to the individual, as in my example, you're every right to share your opinions publicly about a sports team, but choosing to do so in front of angry supporters of the other team is downright retarded.

You do have every right to do so, but the right to do something doesn't absolve you of the responsibility for your own saftey in using common sense to choose when and how, because you cannot garuntee or expect the people you express those opinions to, to adhere to your right, or even recognize it.

Specifically, the point I was reffering to was recently an active discussion occuring via twitter in which someone completely unrelated to the discussion chimed in to throw a jab at one particular side, the result was the people who were offended by that jab (which was basically tarring a large group of people with the same brush, over the actions of one person) was a lot of people who adamently disagreed with the user making their own opinions known, you know, the very opinions the constituion says both sides are intitled to express publicly.

What happened however is that media coverage chronicled it as an attack purely based on gender, when the reality of it was simply someone, as i said, poking the angry bear and wondering why it lashed out.

As i said, both sides are entitled to express their opinions, but exercising common sense when doing so should not be too much to ask of either side.

A large majority of users who support a particular movement are level headed normal people prone to occasionally wording something too strongly, that is true for both sides of ANY argument, it doesn't mean either side isn't entitled to their opinions, and the words and actions of the extremist few from either side should not be used to sully the plight of the many.

Well, unless you're willing to tell us in detail what Twitter drama you're talking about, and who these people were, and what they actually said, it's kind of hard for anyone but you to have an opinion about it. All we have are your impressions: the woman was unreasonable and provocative; the response to lash out at her was natural expected and warranted; the media inexplicitly took the womans side. I have no idea what you're referring to so if that's all you're willing to divulge: stupid woman! Stupid media!

I'm, however, willing to talk about some recent controversies where all of us know the people involved. That's Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

In those two cases, an anonymous internet mob threatened and harassed Sarkeesian and Quinn respectively, and the media took Sarkeesian and Quinn's side. In those two cases, the media was absolutely right in taking their side for the reasons described in my previous post. I hope you agree with me on that.

If you feel like mentioning what woman you were talking about, we can discuss her too!

Corruption has always been present within the industry, it was just far less of an issue in the past because print media wasn't an instant form of broadcast, people purchasing magazines for example, couldn't just share a link and have a group of friends read the same thing within minutes, the move from print to online media brought with it a shift from a heavily delayed interface between the publishers, the readers and current events, to active events where reports can be made within minutes of breaking, and read by millions within hours, that brings with it an inherant power, but also responsibility, and very few publications take that responsibility serious enough, many simply abuse it because the turnover from doing so is more profitable.

Sexism has, as i mentioned in my generation breakdown, always been an issue, but i would argue that it has actually become less of an issue even without the recent contraversies, as genres become more and more exhausted for ideas, game developers have been gradually shifting to new concepts in their own ways, in many cases this has been representing humans, of either gender in different ways to how they would have approached them in the past.

And I did cover the companies that own chains of news outlets being a driving force for the change, their attitudes and management by and large has contributed towards the current issue with youtube personalities and once written word editors moving towards visual media, the issue here however isn't a case of, who is corrupt and who is not, the issue is virtually all outlets are prone to corruption, just to a varied degree, be it simply on a level of a particular editor accepting a form of bribe all the way up to the company that owns the franchise.

The primary issue with the topic of sexism in games is that the way it's being handled, or rather, abused to generate revenue, is detrimental to the cause, 4 years ago if you had a discussion with the average male about the depiction of women in games, they would most likely have been indifferent or supportive of the idea of introducing more female roles, after all some of the best games of the last decade feature female protagonists, but with the way the media now handle the topic and tar anyone on the fence of questioning the legitimacy of the argument with the "sexist/mysoginist" brush, that's entirely the wrong approach, and the soap boxing going on is rife, many previously unknown and barely known feminists, have used said soapbox as a means to draw attention to themselves and their arguments either by putting themselves in the firing line and then playing the victim or by simply nsuring outreach by approaching either positively or negatively, the largest possible groups they can find.

In this day and age, saying "your all a bunch of neckbeards living in your parents basement" then having the people you said that to call you a bitch, is enough to get you in the news and have an instant following, te media is pandering to this trend and propogating it by providing the soapbox and clinically disecting anyone who dares question it.

Make no mistake however, corruption isn't a "a couple of the sites" level, frankly in my time working in the industry, there's very few websites that I would consider to be "clean" anymore, there's just something about monitary transactions and emails containing pre-publication reviews with scores between publishers and editors that just rubs me the wrong way.