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Forums - General - Minecraft Creator: "We Did Not Pay Anyone To Party"

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Mr Khan on 30 March 2013
badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:

I agree that Mojang likely didn't do anything wrong here, just that the outrage still means we've dragged this issue out into the open. If they really didn't do anything wrong, no harm will come to them, but we make headway on an important problem.

On a related note, i also agree that the women at the IGDA thing hardly qualified as "scantily clad," but again, the positive undertones here is that the game industry is standing up and acknowledging something that's been a big problem for a while.

But I'm not sure that they are. It seems like they're taking legitimate frustrations over shitty depiction of women in games, the scuzzy treatment of female journalists at trade shows, a lack of prominent female developers, etc., and focusing it all on whomever happens to catch their attention at the moment. The way some people are reacting to this non-story on Twitter is beyond parody. Their anger isn't really about what Notch did, but he's the recipient of all their pent-up wrath for the moment.

If everyone goes nuclear every time a bunch of dudes who happen to make games party with a bunch of girls whom they maybe paid or didn't pay, that just further polarizes everyone and does nothing about the more fundamental issues. Meanwhile, you can have industry figures just keep saying, "Oh yeah! Women! They, uh... need to be in more games! Yeah!" and being praised for it without anything ever really changing.

There doesn't need to be a weird tension created about portrayals of women or minorities or gays or whomever. That's just going to make it harder for anything to improve. There needs to be a more fundamental reevaluation of how the industry is making the same kinds of games over and over and over, and how the high-wire act of AAAA budgets stifles creativity and will eventually cause the whole industry to burn itself out. Battlefield 4 being the latest really good example of this. Graphics aside, I can't even tell the difference between it and Battlefield 3, and yet there was EA (who are villains in every way except when they talk about how much they love gays) talking about how important story-telling is and how much Frostbite helps them with it and blah blah blah. But they're serving up the same shit as ever, and the day they say, "Oh, by the way? The guy you're playing who's shooting everybody? He's gaaaaay!" is not going to be progress.

Everything has to have a start (though i must say i really agree with your post here). I mean, the touching-off point (at least in the popular viewpoint) for the American Civil Rights movement was something as trivial as who gets to sit where on a bus, the kind of crap that elementary school kids get upset about.

I agree with you in that they need to follow through on this in a huge way (and that the sexism problem is tied to the general, vastly immature and myopic viewpoints of developers, further illustrated by the douchebag antics of Mark Rein vis a vis Wii U and how the GDC attendees apparently approved of his cavalier insults against a chunk of the market). The whole game industry needs to take a long, hard look at itself, where it is, what it's doing, and where they want gaming to go. Video games can end up like movies (a true medium, as diverse and neutral as a painter's canvas), or end up like American comic books (technically a medium, realistically chained by dogmatic thinking and permanently stuck in the nerd niche aside from a few marketable names and a few visionary creators).

What it would take, i think, would be a migration of non-gamers into the gaming industry. As proud as I am of being a nerd, when we run the asylum, we tend to get trapped in fan-service (of one form or another) very, very quickly.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

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badgenome on 30 March 2013
Mr Khan said:

Everything has to have a start (though i must say i really agree with your post here). I mean, the touching-off point (at least in the popular viewpoint) for the American Civil Rights movement was something as trivial as who gets to sit where on a bus, the kind of crap that elementary school kids get upset about.

Uh... that's not trivial. That's saying, "When I come along, you jump out of the way because you're inferior." It wasn't a triviality, it was something that was emblematic of the overall situation for black people.

What we have here is people gnashing their teeth in rage that Notch may or may not have paid women to show up at a party and flirt and take silly pictures. He maintains that he didn't, and there is literally no evidence that he did except for a girl who works for a gaming website saying, "Well, I talked to someone who talked to someone who said she was being paid $300 an hour to be there."

I mean, this is the shit he's dealing with:

"Whether or not you FEEL that you did, other people FEEL that you did."

It's not about facts, it's about feelings. "I FEEL you have aggressed against my gender because you're a rich man and I'm a neurotic fuckwit, and I deserve to be taken seriously because I FEEL that I do." The only thing Notch has done wrong here was being excessively nice about it to the point of agreeing to meet her at a restaurant and talk it over when she is being this unreasonable.

If every controversy or non-troversy can't simply be about whatever it's about but about the overall role of women in the industry, nothing good is going to come of it. You're not going to get better depiction of women in games or more female studio heads or whatever it is by shrieking at Notch for maybe hiring hostesses for a party and turning him into a scapegoat for every slight or injustice experienced by a person with a vagina in the gaming industry. You're just going to come off looking like a bunch of angry harpies with chips on their shoulders.

Or worse. Like the stereotypical insecure women who hate all other women, especially ones they perceive to be prettier than they are. One of her arguments is, "People are saying that there were an excessive amount of ridiculously hot women in the VIP room?" Hot women in the VIP room of a club?! No fucking way! This fucking patriarchy, I tells ya!