@hippie_genocide said:
@voysa_reezun said:
@hippie_genocide said:
No matter what your opinion of Anita Sarkesian is or what she has to say, it's video games people, damn! You don't need to escalate to such a level that you are making death threats to people. This is supposed to be about entertainment and recreation, not something you take so seriously that you resort to vicious attacks over.
Video games are just a proxy for a larger fight about the roles of men and women (or the perception thereof) in our society that has been going on forever.
Yet they choose video games as the battleground to wage this war on? Even if I were anti-feminist, I'd choose a topic with a little more substance or weight behind it to get my agenda across. And I thought GamerGate was supposed to be about ethics in games journalism? She's not a journalist and has nothing to do with that. So, I guess it's not about that...
Video games are a representation of something that certain people like and are comfortable with. When they sense a threat from outside forces that might change that something, they react.
Look at what is happening to the video game industry right now. We're getting more voices from different backgrounds, cultures, genders, ethnicities coming in. When people come into something with an already established culture, they start to break down that culture, demand for changes that suit them, etc., and the people who are already a part of the culture and like it because they forged it to suit themselves fight back. It's a good old-fashioned culture war, but instead of forging it on a golf course or a baseball field or in dance halls, it's happening in video games.
Leaving Ms. Sarkeesian aside specifically, what you have is the perception from certain people, let's call them "Old Gamers" in the culture that the people coming in, or "New Gamers" want to change or take away certain things that the Old Gamers like: Booth babes, scantily-clad female characters, traditional methods of gameplay, etc. Whether or not this perception is correct or not depends, of course. Some people are critiquing video games in different ways to try and get gamers to think about what they are playing; others do want certain things to be cut out of gaming completely. Either way, Old Gamers are threatened by this. They don't like these newer gamers that are different from them and that have come into THEIR hobby demanding certain things.
The problem is that Old Gamers and New Gamers are often represented by figurative bomb-throwers (and at the rate some of these Old Gamers are deteriorating mentally, maybe some literal ones, too) who do less to advocate for their side and more to stir the pot. I wish we could just have a big tent where everyone is invited to make the games they want and everyone is invited to critique whatever they want, and if you don't like the games, don't play them, and if you don't like the critique or you disagree with it, politely critique the critique.
GamerGate, at this point, is a mass of folks with competing desires, many of them ones that I find personally reprehensible. I also think that the side for inclusiveness in games has some terrible reps, though of course not even remotely equal to the GG folks in their terribleness, so I'm not trying to draw a false equivalence here.
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