Problem Machine

Did you know that one week ago today is the day Dishonored Marty McFly went to the future?

Wow, I thought that might help, but no it completely does not. Fuck video games* *Congrats video games** **FUCK video games.

I didn't want to editorialize before anyone else got a chance to read it and form their own opinion, but yeah that's basically my take on it as well. By the time I read to the bottom I was furious. I'm glad I didn't break anything, but damn if I didn't come close.

EA Director comments on GamerGate

So I think this whole implementation is shitty for reasons I don't feel like talking about here and I dunno if it's going anywhere. But I made a curation page anyway cuz fuck it. edit: Also Jon Blow's curation descriptions crack me up.

I think those criticisms are legitimate in terms of the speech as a reflection of the state of gender relations, but I kind of think, like, any speech that actually gets people to do something is good. It may not be the best in terms of its worldview, but that doesn't mean it can't make the world better. I think it's probably more relevant to judge a speech by the impact it has than by the purity of its rhetoric. It's still a valuable critique, though, don't get me wrong. I've been thinking a lot about why, for me, these asides about how these things affect men as well are messages I'm very appreciative of, even if they're not exactly feminist, and I think, for me, it has more to do than just being concerned with my own state of affairs as a male. The main thing that drove me towards feminism in the first place is the ideal that everyone should be allowed to be who they are, without being artificially constrained by social or legal constructs. There should be no boundaries on identity, only on harmful expressions of it -- you can self-identify as a serial killer if it pleases you, but if you actually kill anyone you go to prison. This is the ideal of equality that I, personally, strive for, and because feminism is a necessary step towards that end I am a feminist. However, for my personal viewpoint, it's not specifically the way the system restricts women that is my concern, but the way The System (of which feminist Patriarchy is a component) constrains EVERYONE. So, I dunno. Maybe it's bad feminism to talk about how these things affect men, but it's good humanism. I think we should be attacking these problems from all angles, not just from that of pure feminism. That being said, framing the situation entirely as an appeal to men has, itself, a hint of patriarchy to it. These are good criticisms, but come from a point of view I don't completely share, because for me feminism is just one branch of a greater utopian movement.

Man, way more than that cover was gross, it was just shitty. I think it's weird that that one to got singled out for attention in a world of gross, shitty covers though.

Just watched. Mostly pretty good but there was some kind of bioessentialist stuff in there (being discriminated against for the ability to bear children). Slightly tone deaf if you're aware of trans issues, but a lot of stuff that needed to be said got said there.

Why are we talking about Wolf Blitzer? I looked over the last page and didn't see a link to a video.

this shifty fuck

I honestly have far less problem with things that are explicitly transgressive. If the idea is that you're doing terrible things because you want to explore them, that's, to me, a lot less gross than exploring them in a way that tries to make them somehow not terrible. To bring it back around to violence, one of the studies I read when I was researching the effects of violent media observed that the kind of violent portrayal that was most likely to instill violent worldviews in young children was violence that is shown as bloodless, just, and without emotional or physical consequence -- in other words, exactly the kind of 'sanitized' violence we feed them. I have zero qualms about games that own their violence and portray it realistically, but those which try to frame their violence as justice, as the only reasonable course of action, bother me. The same goes double for rape: If someone wants to play/make a game about rape where it's explicitly transgressive and terrible, I think that's a lot fucking better than a game with 'soft' rape where the girl falls in love with her rapist afterwards because she just needed a little 'pushing'. The fact that, as with the above example, it's the former that tends to outrage people, while I think the latter is just as prevalent and far more offensive in its worldviews, is something that will never stop bothering me. it's a chicken and egg kind of thing. I mean, to a fairly large degree the art we produce is our culture: I don't think it's a matter of one influencing the other to be sexist, I think it's both symptom and cause. By addressing sexism in the art we produce, we are fairly directly influencing the opinions of what is and isn't okay in our culture. Did we stop putting racial caricatures in our cartoons because it was no longer acceptable, or did we become less accepting of racial caricatures when they disappeared from our cartoons? I don't think you're wrong that it's primarily the former, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the latter at all. To claim so would be to say that art has no impact on culture, which seems to me to be doing a grave disservice to art.

I see myself as Alpha Kappa. GrayFace.

I think a real nice silver lining of this whole thing has been the way that all of the most awful people are gathering together to form a solid block of conveniently-ignorable dipshit.

"He's weakening! We're winning! Go in for the kill, go in for the kill!"

Oh my. That is a rather damning endorsement. This pleases me.

Yeah a lot of people seem to misunderstand how the test is generally applied. One movie failing the test isn't a problem at all -- it's the fact that nearly all movies fail the test, and that the test itself is such a meager degree of equal representation, that's so damning. While I don't 100% agree with that post re: Guardians of the Galaxy (the group saving the galaxy was the intended message), I do find the character of Gamora a bit troubling as an example of a weird backhanded version of female empowerment we've been seeing a lot: The woman who is desirable for her body, not because of sex but because of martial prowess. It's a bit weird to see objectification as weapon so commonly subbed in for objectification as sex object by storytellers who seemingly think that's more feminist/empowering. It's something that's struck me as odd about a lot of the Whedon-esque recent sci-fi stuff.

Whenever times are hard, people look for scapegoats. I think this is in many ways just another manifestation of the economic crunch. These guys are looking at 'SJW's the way that right-wing pundits look at illegal immigrants.

I'm just gonna leave this here. A Sincere Proposal to the GamerGate Community. Wherein 27 game developers claim to speak for all truehearted indie devs in their support for GamerGate. Without naming themselves. Or their studios.

It's super hard! You can put disclaimers and stuff up front, but people never read that shit. I think we just need to hold porn to the same standards we hold other art to: If you're going to portray rape, you need to portray it as a terrible fucking thing to do to a person, and the people it happens to as actual real persons with lives who are affected by the things that happen to them. The role that rape plays in this game is super problematic because both A) it's a trivial slap on the wrist with no lasting consequences, the player is actually incentivized to experience it since it's kind of the main selling point of the game. Taken together, these are tacit arguments that A) rape isn't actually that bad, and the person being raped actually wants it anyway. Once again, I think it primarily comes down to policing your culture. A clear distinction needs to be made between fantasy and reality, and people who bring hate speech into reality need to be penalized if you're going to have a healthy fetish culture. I'm far from an expert, but that's how I sees it. edit:

Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong: It's fuckin' hilarious.

Well -- I don't care about anyone's fetishes. People should be able to get off to whatever they want as long as they don't push it on anyone else. I can't think of a single fetish that would offend me -- assuming, again, that truly transgressive fetishes are kept strictly in the realm of fantasy. I think, from what I was reading, the real problem is the "oh it's just kinda rape, I mean it's not RAPE rape" attitude of the description.

Wow! Just look at what we've been missing with our biased gaming news sites! Well, I'm convinced.

Something interesting about that, though, is that the claims that Anita/Zoe/Phil doxxed themselves have completely disappeared from the dialogue. Other than that, though, it seems to be the same ol' shit.

Rather than just saying "straw man", people need to say "you are misrepresenting my argument in this way". Just saying a fallacy without saying where it occurs is a lazy distraction. Also, they get a lot of mileage by spouting 'appeal to authority', since it allows them to disregard any evidence as to how the actual professional world of journalism operates.

Yeah, seriously, anyone who wasn't convinced that Zoe and Anita were amazing beforehand should be by now, just by the fact that they manage to keep on working in the face of this shit. I don't think many people could do that.