Well, it's been a while since anything excited me enough to write a post.

As most of you know, two sets of extremists - militant far-left hardliners and worthless internet troglodytes - have been waging a war for the last month or so, with normal, run-of-the-mill gamers in the crossfire.

One of the most intense salvos in this war was every Giant Bomb member's favorite writer, Leigh Alexander, declaring that "gamers were dead," or that people with a passion for gaming are no longer relevant, because they're all sexist pigs and the industry is better off not focusing on them. The problem isn't the blatantly inflammatory language, but rather the flawed premise.

the ESA likes to trumpet around the stat that over half of people playing games are female, and that's true... If you include social and mobile gaming. Now, ignore the issues that plague mobile and social gaming for a moment, how most who play will never pay, and how saturated the F2P market is. By putting every part of the gaming market under a catchall umbrella, the ESA is hiding the ugly truth - that most people buying games and paying most companies' bills are men. This is a problem, because the ESA is effectively putting up a smokescreen for AAA developers to hide behind. "Nope, nothing to see here, plenty of women play games! We don't have to do more to get people in!"

Fact is, you're not going to find a lot of ladies who spend enough time (or, more importantly, money) on games to make a dent in traditional "Men first" thinking. Honestly, I don't think it ever will, especially now with industry folks essentially saying - and the ESA endorsing an attitude of - "women can stay in their mobile ghetto, we've done enough."

However, some people who may or may not have good intentions are seeking to purge sexuality from games as a means to bring women in. Spearheaded by female supremacists like Anita Sarkeesian and leftist clickbait rags Kotaku and Polygon, a large movement has emerged, equating sexuality with sexism. From Dragon's Crown to Bayonetta 2, games where women have low cut dresses, tight-fitting clothes and sexy struts have been branded with the scarlet letter of sexism, which only serves to anger people who maybe do want to see more women playing games, but don't approve of the witch hunt we've seen relatively recently. Yeah, there are games that are just stupidly pandering, games that truly do push a sexist worldview, but they're nowhere near as prevalent as female supremacists on the far left would have us believe.

On a side note, the Anita Sarkeesians of the world conveniently forget that many gamers joined the chorus of attacks on Metroid: Other M regarding the degrading way Samus was portrayed and her "battered wife" relationship with Adam.

What needs to be done isn't some purge of sexuality, but rather a broadening of what can be done in the media. The existence of Bayonetta doesn't exclude Alien: Isolation, the Super Mario Bros. series doesn't exclude The Last of Us. The issue isn't to make women into a perfect feminist mold, but to make games that feel authentic, like the stories come from the heart, that the people in them are people. If a woman is scantily clad, she shouldn't be a shy gal, or a general in a unit that's generally fully-armored, or other nonsense like that. This I think will happen eventually, as the medium continues to mature.

Lastly, I think both sides would do well to stop holding Twitter users and forumites as the representatives of the opposing view. I read a very interesting article on the BBC about the toxic nature of online interaction. Yes, the GamerGate war was mentioned at length, but the overriding point was that, for the most part, online debate is poisonous, to the point where people who aren't screaming little shits are leaving forums and social media because it's more trouble than it's worth. The fact is that, for a discussion this important, we have to push away the screamers, the intolerant, the agenda-pushers, and filter the noise out to the best of our ability until the only thing left is people willing to have a conversation. And for everyone's sake, stop using Twitter and social media! For any hope of serious discussion, we need forums to be moderated, and for those moderators to be as impartial as possible. Otherwise, only the status quo will survive.