Moderator: JC Denton
by abe » 13 Jun 2010 00:12
I deal with it by wearing headphones so I can't hear it, and sunglasses so that I feel safe from unwanted eye contact.
I resent that I have to take different routes home than the direct ones, to avoid the blocks where I know there are a lot of workers or neighborhood guys hanging out on the sidewalk as if the girls walking by were some kind of show for their entertainment. I resent that I can't wear a cute dress without it being perceived as an invitation for comments from strangers.
Maybe I don't like that I have to walk several blocks to a faraway store for feminine products or other personal things because I don't feel comfortable asking my "friends" to get them for me from where they're kept behind the counter.
No, wait, here's the worst. The worst is that there are entire demographics of people out there who would dismiss my complaints -- oh, poor you, you get attention because people think you're pretty, they say. Again, I don't think this has anything to do with how I look (although I had a friend tell me recently she fantasizes about disfiguring herself so that she never has to worry about this happening),
It's latent misogyny that happens in big cities; it takes my power away.
"Smile for me, baby." It fills me with rage
UPDATE: From Gillen. Excerpt: "If you’re a man, and you’ve acted like this, the woman you do it to, beneath the polite smile she has to offer, has probably fantasised about you dying." Thank you very much.
by Daniel » 22 Jul 2010 02:44
icycalm wrote:IS THIS WOMAN TOTALLY INCAPABLE OF WRITING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT BULLSHIT? Props to anyone who can quote her doing that.
Leigh Alexander wrote:If I had to choose one failing in my work, it'd be my tendency to choose vague language. It's certainly not the only shortcoming I'm working on, but I think I have such a relationship to the sight, taste and impression of certain words that I lose sight of the fact they might not be ideal for communicating concretely with my audience.
Leigh Alexander wrote:In games journalism, vague words like "gameplay" and "mechanic" are commonplace...
Leigh Alexander wrote:And when I try to talk about games with my friends, I sound like a babbling idiot.
by icycalm » 22 Jul 2010 13:16
Daniel wrote:Though mechanic is less of a vague term than gameplay.
by sand » 10 Aug 2010 22:31
Leigh Alexander wrote:When people who've long demanded diversity...
Leigh Alexander wrote:why does male and white-dominated homogeny in video game protagonists persist, when so much of the audience that wants to be personified in interactive entertainment can't relate?
Leigh Alexander wrote:Even though creativity and self-expression are needed to elevate games beyond predictable "commercial product" industry, the fact remains it's a high risk, hit-driven business, where the answer to why is usually "because it sells." But doesn't the demand for diversity indicate at least some untapped market opportunity, enough to justify the risk?
the alpha hobag wrote:What if it did? It would mean no more excuses, no more economic reasons not to do things differently. No more data with which to dismiss uncomfortable conversations on why developers won't or can't treat race and gender in games. No more marketing spreadsheets to justify taking the path of least resistance. Wouldn't it be much easier for the army of the status quo to ignore any evidence that would challenge them to do anything new?
...
Activision [decides]...what goes in its games -- including the race or gender of its heroes...based disproportionately on focus tests that, the sources tell me, it often skews to support its 'preconceived notions.'
tiresome bitch wrote:That there is an underlying climate of ignorance and bias wafting in the game industry, populated in significant majority on all levels by white males (to where a female or ethnic developer is still, in 2010, trotted out as worthy of special note) is just the darker undercurrent to this story. People can only create what they know. People are hostile to those unlike them. The game industry's culture and practices bear the deeply-ingrained stains of its long-term homogeny -- and as long as people have "well, we're making money," to hide behind, why would anyone want to change?
To those of you who look at internal process information like this and say, "it's just business," bear in mind that the line between business and bias is not as simply or as tidily parsed as you would like. Perhaps it is a CEO's job to relegate the entire conversation about a medium's creative and cultural future to "this is what sells."
Leigh Alexander wrote:You're the consumer...the party-line bottom-line talk should not be your mantle to assume. Don't tolerate "it's just a business", because as those who spoke to me for my article insisted, there exist infinite reams of data that can be applied to prove whatever point the status quo wants to prove, to justify the production of whatever it's easiest for the status quo to produce.
Leigh Alexander wrote:The issue goes beyond gender equity or even general "character diversity"; few would wish for "more female characters" just out of the arbitrary desire for political-correctness. When I asked you about it on Twitter, many of you said you don't care what race or gender your characters are as long as they're interesting.
hobag wrote:As one dev told me on Twitter: "People get really upset when they have their privilege challenged." Which means we should do it. And 'on principle' is a perfectly valid reason. 'It's a business' is not an excuse.
ghost4 wrote:Liberals have turned ethnic minorities into circus attractions, so it's little wonder if they draw attention.
by icycalm » 11 Aug 2010 01:06
ghost4 wrote:ArchStanton wrote:What if I am a liberal, white, heterosexual, Christian male? Am I my own worst enemy? Or do I vanish in a puff of logic?
It's called "self-loathing."
Partly it's a matter of power, or at least the perception of power. Kids can best relate to physical power (e.g. the biggest kid on the playground). So even if there is ultimately little difference in the game mechanics between male and female characters (for games in general), the perception for most kids is likely that the buff-looking male character has the power. That sends a message to girls that only boys get to be physically powerful.ghost4 wrote:Newsflash: no 7-year old kid is going to be thinking about shit like this. You, as an oversensitive liberal adult, are projecting your mentality onto children who have no understanding of any of this nonsense.
Alex Wrench wrote:Casuals like you are all over the place these days, clouding shit up with your "gameplays" and your "untapped media" and idiotic cries that we should first let developers make what they want without outside influence and THEN DEMAND THEY IMPLEMENT SPECIFIC AESTHETIC FEATURES. You're telling Activision to stop forcing devs to use green paint and in the same breath demanding red paint.
Nietzsche wrote:No egoism at all exists that remains within itself and does not encroach—consequently, that "allowable," "morally indifferent" egoism of which you speak does not exist at all.
"One furthers one's ego always at the expense of others;" "Life always lives at the expense of other life"—he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself.
by JoshF » 11 Aug 2010 06:06
It's punishment to associate with liberalism sometimes. I need to come up with my own word that won't include people who talk about how prejudice is bad while automatically assigning people by the skin and genitals they wear into groups with common interests.Liberals have turned ethnic minorities into circus attractions, so it's little wonder if they draw attention.
by icycalm » 11 Aug 2010 13:14
by icycalm » 11 Aug 2010 13:34
by icycalm » 11 Aug 2010 13:57
by icycalm » 11 Aug 2010 14:21
ghost4 wrote:Developers can make their characters whatever race they want to. It's called "living in a free society." If you don't like all those white characters in video games, start your development studio.
by abe » 13 Nov 2010 21:37
I have been a boy. I have been a man. I have been a voluptuous vixen with pistols poised on either swaying hip. I have been a zombie, a pokemon, a pants-less ninja. I have been a plump, pink, vacuum-mouthed ball.
But I have never been a little girl.
I was 10 years old when a game first swallowed me whole; still a real-life child, of sorts.
Soon enough, I was a plumber, then the backside of a beauty on a bumping bike. The list, over time, went on. Still, it took years to realize I had never been me.
Now, all grown up, I can see eye-level with the quandaries of a grownup world - adult questions without adult answers.
How do you depict women in videogames? How do you do it fairly?
Unfortunately, the idea of a monster who's scary because she shatters gender preconceptions may be too controversial for many developers to successfully work into their game design. And besides, her potency is still dependent on the perceptions of a boys' club society. If she wasn't "othered," she'd just be a chick with fangs.
If we let our characters stay gendered, will they always cause trouble? Is there a way to remove sex from gender?
We seem to forget, sometimes, that women exist before and after their sexual potency.
Old women have always been forced out to the fringes of society. When they no longer became socially useful, we used to get rid of them by calling them witches and burning them at the stake. Today, we come to a strikingly similar end by marking them as comic, disgusting and essentially non-human - the octogenarian bundled up in her armchair in Florida, gumming at a bowl of pudding.
The only elderly woman I've ever played in a videogame is the Granny bomb from Worms, who waddles along on a walker, signaling imminent death to my unlucky adversaries.
Personally, I've never been an old woman - not in real life or on screen - though I hope to be one someday. For me, at least, it's much easier to relate to life on the other end of the spectrum, to the world of little girls.
Full-grown women get to battle flesh-eating dogs, wield semi-automatic weapons and work on their wicked tans while playing beach volleyball. Little girls, meanwhile, are nowhere to be seen.
Where have they gone? Are the little girls of the videogame world too busy hosting stuffed animal tea parties to make their presence known? "Excuse me, Mrs. Murphy, but I heard about this bitchin' new game. Couldn't little Susie please come out and play?"
Goodbye Pragmatics, Hello Barbie
It's just not pragmatic... But what is?
A Non-Sexual Creature?
What a little girl could provide, what might just be revolutionary, is a wholly non-sexualized female character - a character free of the moral complications that plague her older counterparts, an answer to the dilemma of how to represent femininity without reducing it to eye candy. Thanks to her age, this girl would be entirely outside the realm of sex.
Uncomfortable as the question may be, it needs to be asked: Can there be such a thing as a completely non-sexualized little girl?
But Alice in Wonderland fans may (or may not) be surprised to hear that Carroll himself is believed to have been a pedophile.
what would it mean to play as a little girl?
Beyond our cultural hang-ups about gender, the larger question remains: What does it mean for an adult to play as a child?
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex and games writer, a MMOG researcher
by JoshF » 13 Nov 2010 22:04
by El Chaos » 17 Nov 2010 12:44
by icycalm » 21 Dec 2010 14:27
by icycalm » 21 Dec 2010 22:13
by ComradeTrotskii » 22 Dec 2010 02:11
Laura Michet wrote:As for ‘gameplay,’ I flat-out don’t use it. If you have to use the word ‘gameplay,’ you’re not thinking hard enough about how you’re playing
by icycalm » 22 Dec 2010 15:19
pre·ten·tious/priˈtenCHəs/
Adjective: Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.
by icycalm » 22 Dec 2010 15:32
Laura Michet wrote:One of the books which has had the greatest impact on me personally is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s about how new scientific fields form—about how we lose trust in old ‘paradigms’ of science and grow, slowly, to adopt new ones. The process invariably involves a certain kind of indoctrination: new generations of scientists must grow up learning the new standards and the new vocabulary in order to communicate or perform productive research together. Scientists need a shared vocabulary and a certain critical mass of shared beliefs in order for them to talk with each other about anything. The same is true for any group of professional people for whom communication is a primary concern. A strong vocabulary with enthusiastic support from the people who use it will be much more useful than one they constantly argue about, or one too coarse to communicate the important nuances of their work.
Laura Michet wrote:We have an awful coarse way of talking about games.
by icycalm » 23 Jan 2011 14:42
by aaden » 27 Feb 2011 21:53
Jane McGonigal wrote:For example: kids who spend just 30 minutes playing a "pro-social" game like Super Mario Sunshine (in which you clean up pollution and graffiti around an island) are more likely to help friends, family and neighbors in real-life for a full week after playing the game.
People of all ages who play musical games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero report spending more time learning and playing real musical instruments than before they started playing the videogame.
And just 90 seconds of playing a game like World of Warcraft - where you have a powerful avatar - can boost the confidence of colleges students so much that for up to 24 hours later, they're more likely to be successful taking a test at school... and more outgoing in real-world social situations.
by icycalm » 16 Mar 2011 23:13
Leigh Alexander wrote:There is nothing to attack, and you have nothing to defend yourself against. Don't take sides; enjoy what you love and let other people do the same. Just play. And be kind to each other, if you can. That'd be really nice.
by Worm » 06 Dec 2011 01:08
Leigh Alexander wrote:One of the singularly interesting things about the MGS games is that the gameplay itself is always an abstraction of the story.
by icycalm » 30 Sep 2012 21:33