Deadpan

Really sorry you feel this way. I certainly didn't intend to pick anybody apart, so my bad if it came off that way.

I'm still not sure what you're taking issue with here, specifically. Her mentions are disconcerting to say the least, but I don't really see a common thread in there besides the usual garbage mansplaining. I certainly didn't want to suggest that everything is going well, either! Academia is pretty messed up, there's not nearly enough funding in it around here (and probably not anywhere else either) and a lot of people who have a say in it still look down on games. I was just saying that this has all been going on for a while, so I don't really share her view of GG specifically having messed things up, even if I don't doubt her experience with it. To repeat, I don't think anybody here is saying that things are great, just that they have not suddenly become bad for this specific reason. As for the wider perception of game-based academia, that also seems to be muddled in a much larger conversation about how the humanities in general are valued in society. I know plenty of people who openly scoff at the idea of writing a dissertation about a book, too. For them it's just all a right waste of time, across all these lines. So, what are we talking about here?

Evidence points in that direction. Moviebob's comment may not have been in entirely good faith, but I think his view of TB's fanbase might not be entirely inaccurate, given what the guy brings to the table of game criticism. Plus it's really hypocritical to use the "your argument is not above critique" line as a way to suggest that his own argument remains untouched. Why the concern for people's right to now criticize Moviebob, but not Moviebob's right to criticize TB himself? I feel much the same way. I don't doubt her experience with that department, but the yarn into which this has been spun about GG destroying academic interest in games is greatly exaggerated. Anybody who ever got an inside view of academia will tell you that funding and support are notoriously hard to come by and distributed in messed up ways: prestige often factors into it much more strongly than merit. Those stereotypes about games not being worth the effort existed before, and so did the parts of game culture that justified the stereotype in people's minds. It's a stretch to say that GG ruined this just because it gives some people who don't know what they're doing another excuse to keep ignoring games, as if these people wouldn't have found an excuse otherwise. My experience has also been that other departments are increasingly interested in games because of this. Been doing a lot of Gender Studies stuff recently and for them GG is an object worth of study all its own, another network of violent anti-feminism to trace and look into.

"As a complete ignoramus, it really bothers me when people who spend many years studying media suggest that it has an effect on people without also immediately giving me a personal lecture about their research (which I have never bothered to look at, of course)" Complete Cookie, apparently. The fucking deep-seated irony of people dismissing the humanities as pseudoscience, while also giving their own armchair summary of the field. These people don't even put real effort into their claims! Anyway, here's my view on how the media really works, based on a full five minutes of intense rumination.

My understanding of Greer, sourced from hearing people rant on Twitter, is that she's one of those trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and poking around a little seems to confirm that. Wasn't there also some hubbub with her recently when she gave a talk at a university and complained about being "silenced" when students put on a different event that would also allow trans folk to speak? Regardless, this is not a person I would be listening to too closely, in case you weren't aware of her views. There's a long standing debate about what equality is actually supposed to mean: equal treatment, equal opportunity, equal chances etc. One angle to consider there, for sure, are the differences between approaching it via equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome, which is what this image illustrates, although with different terms: if you treat everybody perfectly equal in a world which is not, then you end up maintaining the established differences rather than correcting them. This is why things like affirmative action and stipends exist.

I didn't manage to stomach the whole rant, but I didn't notice that they revealed their gender in that point, or did they? It feels like they assume that hugs happening there is due to some mystifying aura, brainwashing techniques or cult rites, rather than the natural result of people who only see each other once a year on that kind of occasion being glad to enjoy each other's company for a while. So much of GG is about getting things backwards, like this case of thinking that hugs cause respect which causes collaboration, rather than the actual progression of working together causing respect (sometimes) which leads to hugs.

As an organized unorganized group, they are completely irrelevant in terms of actual numbers, as they are more than eager to demonstrate whenever they attempt any show of size, like how the "millions" of people supposedly upset over Schafer's sock joke managed to collectively raise a whopping 500 bucks for charity. However, as a symptom of wider trends that fostered and normalized these attitudes and behaviors, as well as still active source of pain and harassment, they remain relevant, I think.

Hello, welcome back!

I think one thing that the conversation about the Owen Aurini mess illustrates beautifully is how those kinds of views are both sad and infuriating at the same time, because they on the one hand managed to work out that something is going fundamentally wrong with their lives and society at large through the genuine pain that generally leads people down that road, and on the other hand they're drawing entirely the wrong conclusions from that pain. Conventional notions of masculinity still very much revolve around making lots of money and buying toys with which to impress women, for instance, and while this has always been impossible to achieve for most people, the current economic unrest means that it's also becoming impossible for more and more men of privilige, who now emerge from that particular wreck blinking and confused. But instead of realizing that idealizing competition and excess was always setting them up for hurt, they blame feminists for spoiling the game. Instead of realizing that the script they've been given is toxic and contradictory, they are befuddled by its ineffectiveness, praise PUAs for providing an alternative, and then turn on those false prophets for lying to them when it doesn't work out. They cry about the oh so terrible struggle of failing to seduce women, but don't stop to consider what it means for them to be reduced to a measure of masculinity. People have already brought up Roosh's near breakdown, and that was pretty much an identity crisis waiting to happen, teetering right on the edge of realizing that all the effort he puts into grooming and seducing women doesn't fill the void in his life, except then he fell right back into the hole of blaming women for "forcing" him to brush his teeth and wipe his butt instead of examining why a life of superficiality leaves him unsatisfied. So like a lot of these people, this leaves him both a sad and a loathsome man. Sad because of the real pain he pins on imaginary sources, and loathsome because his attempts at bandaging up that wound consist mainly of hurting and objectifying women. Oh, in actual GG news, even though I'm not a fan of "factual feminist" and recent Escapist hire Lianna Kerzner, I appreciate that even she manages to see through a lot of GG bullshit and calls them out on it, apparently, in this stream (link goes to a storify summarizing it). The result has been for the other goofs on there to later release another video where they say they've lost all respect for her and condemn her for spreading "lies" even though they're unable to disprove even one of her arguments.

I'm not sure that it is. I'm not entirely up to date on how they do things, but I think most of the reports from casual play go into that player tribunal, where players in good standing decide whether or not something is worthy of punishment (of which there is a sliding scale from temporary bans to permanent bans). That system could still be abused, I guess, but they do have a lot of checks in place to make sure that people put enough effort into it: there's a reward for judging cases, but you only get it if your assassment is in line with the majority vote (and it increases with every "correct" vote in succession, I think), plus you can only review so many cases a day, so better make these count. I'm pretty sure Riot also keeps tabs on the outcomes of these tribunals, although I'm not sure if they have somebody wave through all results or just do spot checks. One fun thing though is that they do email you after a decision has been reached if you reported the person in question, which is a nice way of seeing that you're being taken seriously. Your suggestion matches one relatively recent change: all-chat defaults to off since something like a year, I think, to make it harder for people to smacktalk the other team at least. Kind of, yeah, but they do have a few ways they try to keep that under control too. Like how the second and third towers are closer together, and stronger too I think (which makes it easier for people to retreat) and lanes are closer to each other (which makes it easier for people to go help their teammates in another lane if they are attacked). There's a cap to how strong people can get, too, so if you keep your wits about you and defend well you often have a chance to bounce back. I get what you mean though. You're kind of in for the ride once you're in a game, and there's a lot of pressure, especially if things aren't going your way. That doesn't seem all that specific. Having a teammate in team deathmatch who's basically just cannon fodder for the other team is also worse than not having them there. It's probably more a product of the small team size and long match duration: if you suck at the game, then you might be helping the other team quite a bit over the course of half an hour. The clearly defined roles also lend themselves well to shifting blame I guess.

The interest is more in using language that isn't hurtful beyond the intended target. When I insult somebody, I don't want to do so in a way that is hurtful to larger groups. Regardless, there's not really any substance to your suggestion that all insults are based on problematic differences. I already linked this list, but just to illustrate, people across all genders, races, creeds etc. shit and fuck, so those are perfectly okay, even if they might betray a slightly hypocritical attitude towards perfectly natural acts. All people have assholes, and likewise can be assholes at times. Contrary to your experience, I really also have never had problems accidentally or intentionally driving people up the wall with the comparatively mild expletives I use these days. Like reworking the acronym to call gaters "garbage golems." You make it sound like we need special tools to set them off, if that's even all that helpful, where I found that they do a pretty good job getting worked up all by themselves. I mean, have you ever tried just ignoring people online? They get so furious when you show the audacity to not listen to them. This really isn't something that requires all that much effort, I think. That context was already there via the conversation you responded to, I think. People were talking, mostly, about their own attempts to use more inclusive crass language, and if you saying that it's "not about scrubbing your vocabulary down to only the safest and most universally acceptable words" wasn't intended as a direct response to that, telling people that they were going about this the wrong way, then I don't think you've done a very good job of differentiating it from that. So I'll repeat that, yes, listening to people is a good idea, and that's exactly why I try to follow the guide I linked. People are already telling us how they'd want us to treat them. Activist and advocacy groups have been working for more inclusive language for a long time. I don't have to wait until I mess up and see if somebody feels comfortable correcting me in person.

However, these lists were also created by people, for a reason. People I might interact with one day without realizing! To take their advice onboard preemptively is hardly censorshp: I haven't lost the ability to talk about any subject over how I'd prefer to carry myself in conversation.

Well, share historically. We still have selig, and that dates back to the same common ancestor.

It looks like this was probably "More Science Behind Shaping Behaviors in Games" by Jeffrey Lin, who's a studied psychologist, I think, and in charge of the department of social systems at Riot, which essentially means coming up with ways to address toxicity in their game. I haven't really played League in a while, but I've been watching that part of it with great intent. They seem super dedicated to making it better through everything from little messages on loading bars about how your behaviour and conduct affects teamplay and odds of winning (surprisingly effective for making people reconsider, apparently), to letting people reward other players for good conduct with medals that eventually change how their loading screen icon looks when enough accumulate, to rewarding people with game-currency for taking part in the community tribunal that evaluates reported cases (you are only rewarded if your decision matches the overall vote, so no point in just clicking through them) to just making it easy to report people for reasons anywhere between not being sporting, to actively being abusive, to having an inappropriate username. All the while keeping extensive statistics on what is effective and what isn't, with the same rigor with which they monitor the performance of individual champions to find out who's due for a balance update. I never really noticed how nice that was because I don't play online with strangers that often, but then I recently popped back into TF2 to check out their grappling hook biz, and there was a person on the server I was on whose username was just a combination of slurs and I very much missed the option to just click on a button somewhere to make some higher authority aware that this was making the game unpleasant for me.

All PUAs, all of GG, and an astounding number of men in general.

I'm not sure what the accusation is supposed to be there, either. Maybe they think premeditated comments are corrupt because every person must be completely open to every idea at all times, rediscovering them every second of their lives and forming a one-second opinion before discarding that and judging it with a fresh set of eyes the next. It's the only way to remain unbiased!

Yeah, I remembered that backwards, didn't I?

Isn't it just? Everybody can be silly sometimes. It's also a word that German and English share, although by funny coincidence it came to mean "blessed" here. I guess one potential complaint people might have about all this is that all the insults I end up using these days seem so tame: baby, silly, goof, garbage, etc. But then even that seems more than enough to make some people completely furious.

I think there's a problem in trying to define it via content since the tone argument criticizes a particular rhetorical move that is different from just any kind of argument about tone. Intent and context are very important to the distinction: saying that you are on-board with an idea but think that the tone of a particular contribution is unhelpful is quite different from saying that you would support something if they argued for it in a nicer, less disruptive fashion. The latter is what people tend to criticize, I think. Because it's a power grab. It's a way of holding your support hostage until people cater to you, personally, and because of just how often this complaint is made by men, about feminism, it also often falls into the related category of Not All Men: we would support this, but only once you stop making us feel bad. And the proposed way of doing so, of course, is to stop talking about ways men are complicit in things. Allow us to dictate which topics you are allowed to address, and to determine in what order of importance your movement should address them. We will support you, if we're allowed to be at the helm. Also important to remember, I think, that tone arguments work the other way around, too. You see that every time people describe a particular article on a subject or a particular activist as rational (i.e. not emotional), friendly (i.e. not angry) patient (i.e. not upset), etc. When people describe somebody as one of the good ones, or say that finally there's an article worth reading about this, the implication is, of course, that all the other ones are bad ones, and that all the other articles are worth dismissing.

Ableism can feel like a tricky thing to address in language because of just how many negative words were created in reference to bodies and their problems. Here's a pretty good list for getting started though, which is what I usually link people who want to write at the site I run. It also has a very helpful list of negative words that are unproblematic. I still mess up, but I've been making an effort to scrub my vocabulary accordingly. For instance, I try to use silly instead of stupid these days since the latter implies lacking intellect overall and the former only a momentary lapse in performance, I think.

That's pretty much their dynamic, yeah. A friend of mine described Aurini as a sad, sad copy of the Illusive Man and that continues to be on point. MRAs and PUAs frequently call each other names without noticing the overlaps in audience and philosophy, to my knowledge. So MRAs for instance call PUAs douchebags for treating women poorly even though it's exactly in line with the kind of political system they dream of, and PUAs think of MRAs as weak-ass betas (or however their hateful terminology goes) for needing the support of rules and regulations in order to mistreat women instead of just getting them under control themselves, like real men (barf). MRAs are frequently in denial about how harmful and oppressive their demands are and see them as a way of correcting for perceived privileges of women, so they might still balk at something like PUA philosophy (also for reasons of them sometimes wanting to return to a system of romantic chivalry or other outdated ideals). Meanwhile PUAs think that subjugating women should be a personal act demonstrating the power of the individual, so wanting any help there is a sign that you're not as good at it as them (as indeed has been the accusation that Aurini threw at Owen, right? Jealousy and being unable to "relate to women easily"?) Massive airquotes around """""""relate"""""""" obviously. Also: BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARF

But why do you think this is the case with Twitter but not other places? Except places small enough to have an established consensus on certain topics. What's the special thing about it that makes people go "this... this right here is the breakdown of communication" is what I want to know. Speaking of which, I glanced briefly at the Escapist thread about the matter and there's an entirely unsurprising consensus that no, public ridicule and people taking a stand against them is great, because now the world will see how poor and persecuted they really are and they will find new allies (also somebody said something about Schafer having insulted "thousands of minorities" and I prefer to think that they don't actually call people "a minority" but rather meant that it was insulting to every different ethnicity, creed, sexuality and gender identity imaginable).

Definitely don't want to begrudge anybody their decision to not use Twitter or dislike it, but as somebody with a little exposure to media studies it just gets to me that so much of the complaining happens on a level of griping and generalizing about how communication "is supposed to work" and not a nuanced look at its built-in affordances and mechanics, plus all the complaints that apply just as well to other platforms, but are supposedly only a real issue with this one. The broken abuse report system is definitely a valid complaint, but at the same time I get kind of wary when people make strong claims about what it means for how we should be using the platform. After writing about GG I was once approached by a guy who was adamant that, in his words, if all this abuse happens on Twitter, then surely Twitter is also somehow the cause of it and we should just abandon it, and that strikes me as reading too much into the location of a problem, like saying that if bad things happen to you outside, maybe just don't go outside then. And obviously when I take issue with that stance, it doesn't mean that I think we shouldn't be working harder to make outside safe, just that opinionating on whether people should be going there despite the risks can be various shades of misguided. Which probably speaks to how deeply ingrained this thing is in my life, but it really is a pretty essential tool for keeping up and promoting your work, for writers especially, I think the only thing that's really required to have good arguments on Twitter (which I've definitely had!) is the good will on both sides to just not read the absolute worst into the gaps that its character limit necessitates, and if people don't bring that to the table then I'm pretty sure you're not going to have a fruitful conversation with them given a more verbose platform. When I hung out on other forums, I saw a lot of people get into these discussions that essentially turned into arms races of who could write the longest post in a series of increasingly lengthy posts, while completely talking past each other. They definitely used a lot more than 140 characters, and it didn't seem to make their conversation all that much better.

It's a personal thing, but the echo chamber claim always makes me a bit uneasy. I just think it's an unhelpful generalization that doesn't account for nuance in either how people use the platform or how they interpret social stuff, which makes me think that I'm about to be hit with some "both sides" guff, even though that doesn't necessarily happen.

I think Apple Cider already covered some of the complaints people have with Wu, and I also really recommend following Lana Polansky and Zolani Stewart (as always) who have been saying good things about this yesterday on Twitter. My take on it is essentially that, beyond the occasional ableism that creeps up and some questionable moves (which probably aren't worth getting into if you can't distinguish clearly that it's more than a personal dislike for her), the problem I and many others have with her feminism is that it's the kind of lean-in, trickle-down thing that doesn't address the issues we see as most pressing. Like, I get the impression that she sees it primarily as a way of reaching new markets that were previously ignored (for admittedly sexist reasons). Which is fine, in a sense, but then also when you want to be capitalism's human face like that, you become partly complicit in the havoc it continues to wreak. A lot of people are fundamentally doubtful, for good reason (I think), of anything that argues for minimal change within the system instead of challenging its constraints and workings. Laurie Penny (who I also disagree with on a lot of things) has this line in Unspeakable Things where she criticizes a certain brand of recent feminism that has decided that the biggest issue women face today is the glass ceiling while the real problem is, in her words, not that there aren't enough women in boardrooms, but that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire. Obviously none of this is to say that Wu deserves harassment or needs to be ostracized, but it's entirely people's prerogative whether they want to continue to listen to somebody with those priorities, so I don't get the complaints about "public unfollowings" entirely. The complaints about people getting mad at her for refusing to be the symbol they wanted to make out of her? Somewhat. I hear this suggested casually all the time and I can't say I've ever found it particularly convincing, in part because I've personally learned so much listening to rad folk rant about things on Twitter. And the basis for calling it an echo chamber is what, exactly? That you can set it up in such a way as to surround yourself only with like-minded individuals and try to block negative feedback? Like, how is that different from us selectively choosing friends and interpreting input since basically forever? Maybe I'm not the best of examples since I have some depression and anxiety issues (or maybe I'm just the right example because of that) but I don't dig the unchallenged assumption that if you surround yourself with people who share your views you're on the fast track to becoming some arrogant douche. Like, I can surround myself exclusively with that and still feel like a complete waste of space, honestly. Don't need help to second-guess myself.