Theory

[icycalm]

And what the fuck is supposed to be so bad about a fan drawing a portrait and her thanking him?

Fucking weaboos.

[abe]

On the Hey Baby video game (where you go around shooting guys who make "rude" comments.) Apparently if you want to fill Leigh with rage, just say "smile for me baby" to her.

http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2 ... -miss.html

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.

[Daniel]

IS THIS WOMAN TOTALLY INCAPABLE OF WRITING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT BULLSHIT? Props to anyone who can quote her doing that.

I found quotes by her that are not ridiculous!

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.

In games journalism, vague words like "gameplay" and "mechanic" are commonplace...

She has finally figured out that gameplay is a vague term to use when describing videogames. Though mechanic is less of a vague term than gameplay.

And when I try to talk about games with my friends, I sound like a babbling idiot.

http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2 ... xicon.html

[icycalm]

Though mechanic is less of a vague term than gameplay.

There is nothing "vague" in the term mechanic.

And as for her efforts to become better at communicating "her ideas", it's still nothing to write home about since "her ideas" are stupid. If she really does become better at communicating them all that's going to happen is that it will be easier for more people to see that they are stupid. Which is why it will never happen, and why she will keep preferring vague expressions to more concrete ones.


And P.S.: I clipped your quote. Learn to fucking quote you fucking idiot. You don't need to copy-paste the entire fucking thread for fuck's sake.

[sand]

Leigh Alexander's relentless demonstration of artdyke idiocy continues with her latest post: a completely uncontroversial claim. I'd hesitate to post anything more of hers in a thread the hobag has contributed so generously to already, but this time...

When people who've long demanded diversity...

Oh joy. Here is her inexplicable Privilege.

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?

I know how you feel, when I found out Mega Man was a robot I just lost it.

Some of this stuff is beyond satire:

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?

Good thing Leigh is here to answer these tough questions...

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.'

What an absurd preconceived notion that white men are good at war. Not only does this malignant preconceived notion dominate video games but movies and novels as well! Damn you Activision!

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."

"business and bias..." Catchy. Wait what does bias mean again?

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.

Damn you Freemasons!

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.

And so the essay ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

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.

Bonus from the comments:

Liberals have turned ethnic minorities into circus attractions, so it's little wonder if they draw attention.

[icycalm]

The commenters "ghost4" and "Alex Wrench" are long-time readers of this site, and both of them have repeatedly linked my articles on Kotaku and elsewhere. They totally wipe the floor with her and her fanfags, and some of ghost's replies are even hilarious. Check this out:

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."

Also:

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.

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.

Not to mention that the message they'd be getting would be correct and extremely valuable.

Also this:

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.

It's good to have a couple of smart guys going around and demolishing stupid blog posts like this in their comments section. For me it would be a waste of time, since I have better things to do, but for younger folks who are just beginning to understand what's going on, I think it can be good training in how subhumans think and how to handle them.

As for the whole "liberalism" undercurrent in that discussion, here is, in short, the solution:

The liberal doctrine is that everyone should be allowed as much freedom of action as possible, as long as this freedom does not restrict anyone else's or harm them in any way.

Well, then, in that case no one should be allowed to do anything, because every one of our actions harms someone, somewhere, somehow. This occurs because the world is finite and hence any increase in strength must be compensated for by a corresponding decrease somewhere else. You are always harming someone whether you want to or not, even when you are just sitting there and simply breathing (not to speak of eating!)

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.

[JoshF]

Let's start a campaign to encourage children to paint some of their GI Joe's brown, but ONLY if they're on the Good Guy side. Then let's lobby Hasbro to make half of them women (and ten percent handi-CAPABLE), since women make up half of the population. Would they need to be made out of a less durable plastic or is that sexist? You could sculpt them to look muscular, but that might make it look like they use steroids and steroids are bad. Or it could be forcing an unfair standard of appearance that most girls won't be able to live up to.

Liberals have turned ethnic minorities into circus attractions, so it's little wonder if they draw attention.

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.

[icycalm]

Imagine a politically correct version of Spartan: Total Warrior in which some of the Spartans are not Spartans but black crippled female gay midgets who are also single mothers. The game would be worth playing for the hilarity alone.

I am beginning to think that Leigh may be on to something after all.

[icycalm]

It would be called the "Leigh Alexander Mode Editor" (LAME), and it would be in every game. It would be fully customizable, so that you could waste as much of your life as you wanted reskinning the game to suit whatever subhuman prejudices you were infected with. This, alongside the Retard and Quadriplegic Mode Editor -- which could even be merged with LAME to make the "game" fully customizable in terms of both mechanics and aesthetics -- would presumably shut the hobags and the hofags up and allow designers, now free from underhanded subhuman bullying tactics -- to make what they should be making: the game that they themselves would want to play.

[icycalm]

Of course the subhumans would respond by saying that by privileging the default (i.e. non-subhuman, non-retard) mode, you are still sending a powerful anti-subhuman message, as well as making the players work to create a game which they paid money in order precisely to not have to create, but this objection could be countered by offering several ready-made skins suitable for the tastes of the major subhuman subspecies, and making one of them the default mode (perhaps the most wretched minority one of the lot, to assuage the guilt and self-loathing of the more fortunate). The real mode could then be hidden inside a tree of a dozen options menus, which could be made impossible to nagivate by retards, and then only unlockable by some sort of motion sensing signal code passed on among humans in underground sewers and hideaways.

[icycalm]

The problem is with the mechanics. You can offer several ready-made aesthetic skins easily, but several ready-made mechanical "skins" is quite another thing. And besides, the problem with editors, whether aesthetic or mechanic, is that they always place restrictions on the person doing the editing, and restrictions are something that the raging "liberalism" of the subhumans will never ultimately tolerate. As long as there is even a single subhuman abortion somewhere on this planet, hiding inside whatever godforsaken desert hole, which is not adequately represented in videogames which it would never even cross its mind to play, the subhumans will keep bitching. The ultimate solution then is really this:

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.

But with this we are back to where we started, because it is in the nature of subhumans (women, niggers, fagots, cripples, Jews, etc.), to avoid such a demanding occupation as that of game designer, and to simply sit back and beg white males to make everything for them, and through constant and relentless whining to force them to tailor-make it to suit their own preferences. So the ultimate solution is not really a solution at all. It is at that point that the final solution appears, and becomes increasingly inescapable.

[abe]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... le-Girls.3

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

[JoshF]

I like articles where all the "conclusions" are non-rhetorical questions, like it's our homework to finish the article for them. Even better when they immediately disprove them (little girls can still be sexualized, so can octogenarians and pretty much any living or inanimate object you can name.)

Looking forward to the next FPS starring an 80 year old woman with realistic calcium-deficient hip physics.

[El Chaos]

If she's so interested in playing as a little girl, she can do so in The King of Fighters XI and the Arcana Heart games. She'd also be playing pretty great fighting games while she's at it, so she should certainly give them a try.

... Unless I'm missing the article's point or something, lol.

[icycalm]

http://shmoomentality.tumblr.com/post/2 ... -cnt-sleep

A faget defending hobags, and in the process comically trying to criticize my unassailable opinions. In the end, the faget gives us another dumb cunt as some kind of exemplar that hobags do not all have to be hobags: Laura Michet. And voila something that this hobag has scribbled:

http://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/12/ ... f-revenge/

Now why would these scribblings interest anyone who wants to learn more about videogames?

They wouldn't.

Hence his exemplar hobag is still a hobag.

In conclusion: I win. Again. Deal with that, faget.

[icycalm]

Actually, lol, I read that woman's article and there's nothing wrong with it. But that's the most I can say about it: that there's nothing wrong with it. It's not game analysis -- it is entirely aesthetics, and her comments would probably be somewhat valuable as an aside in an extensive Assassin's Creed or Assassin's Creed II review, but if anything all they do is reinforce the stereotype that women are superficial airheads who only care about appearances.

Let's see someone linking an article of hers that dissects a game's mechanics, and we'll talk.

[ComradeTrotskii]

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

http://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/07/ ... ese-words/

Not what you were looking for but it caught my eye.

[icycalm]

Welcome to 2007, Laura.

Also, that's an entire article about how she sees no meaning in the word pretentious. Welcome to 2005, Laura. That's exactly what Tim Rogers, Eric Waugh, and all the other NGJ fags have been saying for years. All pretentious people fail to see the meaning of the word pretentious, for some reason. So let's be nice for once and help them out:

http://www.google.com/dictionary?q=pret ... pair=en|en

pre·ten·tious/priˈtenCHəs/
Adjective: Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.

According to this definition, then, her article about how the word pretentious is meaningless is pretentious. There, that wasn't so hard was it.

[icycalm]

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.

lolwomen. The part I bolded is saying the exact opposite to what philosophy has been working at for 2,500 years. Her criterion of truth is how "enthusiastically" a bunch of uneducated retards "support" their absurd and deceitful vocabulary. And this is her finisher:

We have an awful coarse way of talking about games.

Indeed you do.

She is a hobag through and through. I see no reason whatsoever to not place her at the exact same spot with Leigh Alexander. Just try to read that article straight through (no skipping!) and tell me if you don't get a headache from it.

[icycalm]

Taken from the following thread (where I am also mentioned several times, if this sort of thing strikes your fancy):

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... t387006843

[aaden]

That wacky lady who insisted we can "cure cancer, end world hunger, and stop climate change" by playing video games has graced us with another gem:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgo ... 23208.html

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.

"Pro-social game" sounds like something out of icy's dictionary of subhuman language.

The sudden turn-around at the end of the article where she claims that more than 28 hours of video games per week can cause "depression and social anxiety" is great too. 90 seconds per day of World of Warcraft will make you socially outgoing, but 3 hours will give you social anxiety!

[icycalm]

http://kotaku.com/#!5770361/how-to-stop ... t=37284880

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.

Deep, man.

[Worm]

A true howler (emphasis is her own!):

One of the singularly interesting things about the MGS games is that the gameplay itself is always an abstraction of the story.

http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2 ... ommon.html

[icycalm]

http://www.edge-online.com/features/vid ... s-decline/

I had forgotten she's writing for Edge too now. Still scribbling the same article over and over again, year after year after year. And she is practically everywhere now. She's like a spice or a condiment: when a publication wants to show that it is aware of and covers the pseudo-intellectual/feminist/social "responsibility" angle they call up Leigh Alexander to rewrite for them her Article. "Let's add a pinch of Leigh Alexander to our frontpage, you know, to round it off", they say, and out comes fearless, tireless Leigh to paraphrase herself for the umpteenth time. And so the frontpage now features, besides articles on videogames about death and boobs, an article that bemoans death and boobs in videogames, so as, you know, to round it off.

[ingolfr]

So basically we are childish egoists for simply enjoying games. But she is a mature adult for begging that our hobby be changed to accommodate her lol.