Merus

How have you never heard of people complaining about sexposition Like, one of the core third-wave feminist arguments is that people deliberately do not listen when sexism is pointed out to them, that people live in a sexist culture that lulls them into complacency, and here you are claiming that because you've never heard about people complaining about the imbalance of nudity on Game of Thrones then it mustn't exist Also it's seemingly more prevalent in gaming because gaming is a new, participatory medium without a lot of gatekeepers and a history of shrugging its shoulders and going 'sure, why not' when representing female main characters, and it's on the cusp of shedding its last vestiges of cultural irrelevancy. It's a billion-dollar industry that appears in museums and inspires films and television and books and comedy routines and literally the last thing holding it back are 'gamers' and the idea that games are for teenage boys and not for everyone everywhere.

They do that because every game is shit six months out from release. Games aren't made sequentially: they're shit, and they're shit, and they're shit, and then if they're lucky they stop being shit. Most journalists know this, and they try and compensate for it because it helps nobody to be honest. The solution is to stop doing previews entirely but somehow the audience won't go for that. WE ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO HAVE ONE PROBLEM AT A TIME SCREW YOU STARVING CHILDREN IN AFRICA AND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN TIBET AND CREEPING FASCISM IN HUNGARY, WE ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO FOCUS ON AMERICAN POVERTY NOW I'm going to guess you don't know what intersectionality means. That's okay. You've presumably got Google, you've got time, it's big and hard. I think you missed the point of the video (and that video really back-ended its argument, so if you skipped out early it probably came off as fairly nitpicky): the context is, as you describe, putting a rubber stamp on what is clearly shitty behaviour. What we don't notice that there's lots of games that lazily rubber-stamp objectification of women, and violence towards objects, as part of their fantasy, because we also have a context that rubber-stamps shitty behaviour towards women. That's why stripping it of its context is important: without the rationalisations, we see it for what it is, and we have to ask questions; for instance why exactly did no-one point out the run-down-a-woman-with-a-train achievement as potentially shitty? How were we all okay with that? And because we have that context out here in the real world, bad writers unthinkingly put it into their games. So it's bad writing, but it's bad writing that reveals something about the unconscious assumptions of the writers. No-one is claiming that most writers in the games industry are women-hating misogynists. It's that, just like us all, they come from a culture that doesn't think objectification is really a problem. (A non-feminist example: why don't people jump out of the way of cars in games any more? They used to, back in the PS1 era. And why does no-one point out that it makes no sense for people to stand there and be run over, not anticipating your movements at all?) If you are genuinely smart enough to have that discussion without being taken in by seemingly-rational arguments that aren't secretly rooted in victim-blaming, sexism or a profound misunderstanding of how the games industry works, you're... well you're probably a liar because we're struggling with it here and we're better than average. Considering that you characterise a social justice debate (which contains as part of the premise that one side of the argument has to justify whether they're allowed to even exist) as a 'shouting match', I'm going to guess you're not going to meet that criteria. It's okay. It's a journey, and we all start somewhere.

This is a good summary of the whole thing. Badass Digest has a lot of respect in the film industry - it's attached to one of Austin's most popular movie theatres, it employs some particularly excellent writers, and it covers the kind of movies that film nerds really like.

Alexander Bruce lives in Melbourne, I'd like to know how he managed to get into a clique from Melbourne and make Antichamber a success, and also I'd like to know why he did show after show after show for years if all he had to do was join a clique to get recognition and accolades.

I do this for MMOs, which generally involve working out how best to acquire some specific resource and then hoofing it.

Yeah, but there's something to be said for being aware of otherwise arbitrary social conventions. Men wear a suit to go to a job interview not because it's necessary to wear a suit to be interviewed, but to signify mostly that you're aware of the convention. Men who don't follow that convention despite it being fairly well known may not be aware of other, more important social conventions like turning up to work on time, showering, or being respectful to others. They're the brown M&M riders of social discourse.

Kind of garbage quality, but there's a reason why this is the only thing people remember about Ratatouille: Good journalism is fair, but good journalism takes a side. It's completely unreasonable to expect a journalist to champion a work without being allowed to support it in ways that actually matter. The only reason we even have journalists is to champion new works that need friends; Activision, 2K, EA and Ubisoft are perfectly capable of selling their games on their own.

Listen, the end-game here is to get Gabe Newell to say something about this

goddammit I hate changing avatars it wasn't even technically anime

So I finally found a comedy podcast I really like (MBMBaM is funny, but they also do a twenty minute ad read and that gets old fast): TOFOP is popular Australian comedian Wil Anderson and his friend Charlie Clausen, and on the same feed is FOFOP which is Wil Anderson without Charlie Clausen but with other friends as Wil tries to break into the American comedy scene. The episodes with Dave Anthony are a particular highlight.

We have the weirdest fucking emoticons. It's like fucking pinea**le all over again.

Fuck, I'm going to have to change my avatar now that having an anime-ish avatar is the new online fedora. Fuckin' hate avatars. Okay, but if Zoe Quinn is using "FUCK YOU PAY ME" like everyone else uses "FUCK YOU PAY ME", then your comparison would be more apt if instead of getting a masters, you were doing it for the potential that the university would put you in their newsletter. You're doing academic work, and in return you get a qualification, and that's the deal you've made, with the expectation that your masters will help you get a job. Which isn't a safe assumption, anyway, because of exactly the thing Zoe is talking about: the games industry is new enough that academic qualifications aren't anywhere near as valuable as a game portfolio, and the tools to make an impressive game portfolio are free. You don't deserve to work for 'exposure' because you don't need to be known to participate. There's a whole discussion to be had about how most poor people have little time or energy to be able to make a game, but that's well out of scope and it's not reasonable for the industry to single-handedly fix poverty. This is exactly what I was saying earlier about people reading arrogance into Quinn because you've been told she's arrogant and you're trying to confirm that - 'fuck you, pay me' has connotations that aren't going to come across unless you're willing to dig deeper, and you won't be willing to dig deeper if you're going in with preconceived ideas. Your gaslighting can just fuck right off, though.

I remember seeing that tweet just under a friend of mine reporting they were going to watch Muppet Treasure Island, so there was some weird synchronicity there. Edit: I'm in my Data Mining class, and we're being asked to consider a data mining project. I'm sorely tempted to build a classifier that can determine whether or not someone's a misogynistic troll. (It's down to that, or trying to work out whether a sentence in a review is positive or negative.)

Yeah, but does she? Because a lot of that 'scrutiny' is in the service of misogyny disguised as reasonable-sounding rhetoric (because part of the problem with sexism is that we think it's reasonable), and there's plenty of relatively normal behaviours that can be twisted when presented in the context of someone being a master manipulator - for instance, putting on a game jam while also being critical of another game jam. I would be very, very careful about any accusations that come up about Zoe in the future, because you cannot be sure that misogyny or character assassination is not a motivating factor. On a lighter note, here's Seanbaby, showing both sides of the Sexism in Games issue:

I can't imagine either Rock Paper Shotgun or Kotaku will care about being accused of bias, or provoking responses from sexist commenters.

That seems like a lot to pay to watch Power Rangers, but whatever floats your boat I guess. Here's USgamer editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish writing about Mighty No. 9 on his personal blog - he was moderating the panel where it was revealed, and he mentions that he put a significant amount of money into it to be able to design a challenge.

This might be worth checking out, because we have players who wing it playing with players that set out a plan from the beginning and crush all comers under their heel.

Imagine how much time this must take. To get the perfect footage from all these games is a full time job. Anita Sarkeesian has a full-time job playing video games and somehow this means she hates video games.

I love the idea that, no matter what, sentient creatures will inevitably invent standardised shipping containers.

I used to have a 1st generation Mew when I was a kid, and gave it away because you can't pass Mew through to the later generations. Doesn't look like you can really get Mew these days except through passing it up through the generations.

Oh that's Matt Lees, he did the E3 Abridged series last year. Also he basically said everything I was going to say and made a bunch of points that I probably should have thought of, so I guess we'll just use this thread to store conspiracy jay-pegs.

Well, there are diary entries tied to specific interactions and an implicit challenge to find them all, and the game was built expecting speedruns. So that already exists. I personally take Sid Meier's view that a game is a series of interesting choices. What counts as interesting is different for everyone; I strongly suspect that those people who call Proteus 'not a game' do not find 'ooh, what's over there?' to be interesting.

Thanks a lot, Jon! I've been using LastPass for a while now.

It's MINTS.

Pfft, amateur. Close, no. Unhealthy? Yes. I don't know how you're supposed to convince developers to show journalists their commercial product that's completely broken if developers can't trust journalists to give it a chance.